Manager, Engineering - AI Search Platform

About the organization

Content Infrastructure & Solutions (CIS) empowers engineers working on content, studio and enterprise applications to be innovative and agile in supporting Netflix's global content production needs. We do that by providing scalable and resilient infrastructure for large-scale media, assets, data, workflow and communication use cases.

Connected Enterprise Foundations (CEF), part of CIS, provides highly leveraged and fully managed data, search, workflow and messaging platforms for Content, Studio and Enterprise Engineering. CEF's charter is a connected enterprise experience: consistent, composable platform primitives that application teams and their agents build on, rather than a collection of separate products each with its own model of the world.

About the team and the role

The AI Search Platform team owns Graph Search, Netflix’s enterprise search-as-a-service platform. Graph Search provides engineering teams with a unified way to index, search, and resolve entities across Content, Studio, Ads, and Enterprise. The team also builds and operates capabilities that enable internal users and agents to access the graph through natural language. It partners closely with the Knowledge Foundations team on the Unified Data Architecture, Data Dictionary, and Entity Graph.

You will lead a team of eight engineers based in Warsaw. The team has deep end-to-end ownership of the platform: it operates its own on-call, has delivered order-of-magnitude latency improvements across indexing and query paths, and has developed AI-powered operational tooling that has been adopted by other CIS teams.

What you will do

You will lead a team of software engineers to deliver high-impact results. In this role you will:

• Be a thought partner to the product manager, engineers, and engineering managers across Netflix engineering in setting the vision, strategy, and adoption path for Search, natural-language search, and Smart Tables as platform capabilities.
• Collaborate closely with Knowledge Foundations and the broader CEF organization to align roadmaps across Graph Search, Entity Graph, Data Dictionary, Unified Data Architecture, and Communications Platform.
• Serve as a credible technical advisor to the team, helping engineers make thoughtful, well-informed decisions in complex and ambiguous situations.
• Raise the team’s rigor around impact. Define meaningful leading indicators, ask stakeholders for evidence behind their requests, and deprioritize work that does not demonstrate sufficient value.
• Own the operational excellence of a Tier 1 platform, including 24x7 on-call responsibilities, capacity and performance headroom, infrastructure-level data validation, observability, and SLOs.
• Drive AI-first ways of working across the team, both by treating agents as first-class consumers of the platform and by advancing agent-assisted engineering practices.
• Build trusted relationships with partners and stakeholders, connect opportunities across teams to maximize business impact, and prioritize work beyond the boundaries of your immediate domain.
• Communicate complex technical and product ideas clearly through written and verbal channels and influence decisions across a diverse set of stakeholders.
• Balance near-term business needs with strong engineering principles by investing in foundational technical work, paying down technical debt, and making incremental improvements.
• Lead, hire, coach, and develop a team of engineers.
• Foster a strong culture of accountability and help the team deliver reliably and predictably for critical business stakeholders.
• Build and nurture an inclusive team culture where every team member feels empowered, respected, and able to contribute at their best.

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries. The role offers the opportunity to lead a team at a critical inflection point for a Tier 1 platform, with significant scale and impact on internal engineering workflows.

What we are looking for

• Experience building and operating highly reliable platform systems that support large-scale, business-critical use cases, including 24x7 on-call responsibilities and highly available, low-latency services.
• Strong technical acumen in distributed systems, with the ability to move between implementation details and broader architectural strategy.
• Experience building and leading inclusive teams. Ability to attract and retain talent, ensure diverse perspectives inform decisions, and foster a culture of accountability.
• Ability to create an environment of open, direct communication where team members feel comfortable giving constructive feedback.
• Strong long-term strategic thinking and a platform mindset, with the ability to define and articulate a clear product and technical vision.
• Ability to prioritize strategically, align the team’s investments with larger business goals, and change direction when new evidence or broader impact warrants it.
• Rigor in decision making and the ability to reduce ambiguity through the right combination of data, stakeholder input, constructive dissent, and targeted experiments or pilot investments.
• Experience working effectively with product managers and TPMs, building trust and collaborating on both strategic vision and project execution.
• Strong partnership and influencing skills across engineering partners and stakeholders, including demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across globally distributed teams and time zones.
• A track record of helping teams deliver critical priorities reliably amid competing demands.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering and a clear point of view on how engineering teams should adopt it safely at scale.

Nice to have

• Experience building scalable and reliable search, retrieval or data infrastructure for engineering stakeholders.
• Familiarity with Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, vector and semantic retrieval, knowledge graphs, or ontology and taxonomy modeling.
• Experience designing platforms where agents, not only humans, are first-class consumers, including provisioning and debugging through APIs rather than a UI.