Netflix is hiring social data/integration nerds

I’ve previously used my blog to talk about a lot of things in technology, rant about politics, and ramble on about meaningless trivia. Today I’m trying something new; talking about one of the many amazing job opportunities I’ve recently heard about in Silicon Valley. I’ve built up a somewhat random reputation for helping to connect companies with technical talent. I love helping people, I love nerds, and I’m enthusiastic about helping companies succeed, so it comes pretty naturally to me.

Which brings me to a rad opportunity I recently found out about …

I’m an avid fan of Netflix and I use the service daily on my Apple TV. I’ve met a few people who work there and recently ran into Mike Hart from Netflix and he mentioned that he’s working on forming a team to focus entirely on building out Netflix’s social strategy. He said that the company views this as a big opportunity. You can’t help but hear Mike out on these kinds of initiatives. After all, he was the guy who created, incubated, and led the Netflix API team. You may recall that this small team now powers about 200 retail devices on the market and is the 5th largest API in the world with 20 billion calls a month.

What’s not to like about Netflix? They have a CEO that Fortune named Business Person of the Year. They spent $1m on the Netflix Prize to improve their algorithms. They’re the fastest growing public company in Silicon Valley. They have a cultural thesis that is widely emulated around the world. Hell, they’re even licensing original TV shows now!

So what, exactly, would you be doing if you’re lucky enough to land this gig? Well, there are two opportunities open: a senior-level Senior Facebook Integration Engineer, and a Lead Test Engineer for Social Systems. The team you’d be joining would be small, maybe four to six people in total, and you’d be, basically, figuring out ways to integrate Netflix into the social services you love and use every day. Long term you’ll be helping to figure out how the social graph can be leveraged to to help you, and your friends, discover great TV and movie content. Your daily hacking session would include writing Java, wrangling servers in AWS’s cloud, and munging data using Apache’s Cassandra project. You test engineers can expect lots of automation and debugging. The best part is that those pesky UI/UX tests are handled by a separate team! You’d be focused solely on continuous integration, testing, and triaging the underlying social infrastructure fabric at Netflix.

If working for an amazing leader, at a company with an outstanding culture, working on complex problems with millions of users and tons of data wasn’t enticing enough, I’ve been assured by Mike that you’ll be highly compensated. How highly? Well, Netflix, being the awesome company they are, give you a total compensation number and then allow you the flexibility to choose how you want that portioned out (e.g. If you want more options, they’ll lower the salary or if you want better healthcare/401(k)/benefits, they can move around options and salary). Total compensation? Let’s just say I’ve confirmed it will definitely be at top of market (In fact, Mike caught me off guard with their compensation; it’s seriously the best I’ve seen in Silicon Valley).

Engineers interested in learning more about this opportunity should contact Mike Hart for more information. If you know of anyone interested, please pass this along. Additionally, if you tweet out the link to this blog post, I’ll be randomly selecting two people to receive 6 month streaming subscriptions from Netflix for free.

Disclaimer: I have not, in any way, been compensated to write this post. If, in the future, people do compensate me for writing up job opportunities, I’ll be sure to let you all know. Mike gave me a few talking points and made sure this post wouldn’t anger Netflix, but otherwise the words and details outlined are my own.