Staff Software Engineer 6 - Java Platform Team
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Warsaw
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Staff-level experience designing and owning shared libraries or platform components used by many teams, including managing the long-term impact of API decisions. Demonstrated experience in Java and di
- A technical leader without needing authority. You have led multi-team technical efforts, resolved disagreement between strong engineers, and made hard-to-reverse decisions with incomplete information.
- An end-to-end owner. You take a problem from discovery through design, rollout, telemetry, and iteration, and you measure whether it worked.
- User focused. You learn what teams need before deciding what to build.
- An invested mentor and coach. You support the growth of other engineers through mentoring, knowledge sharing, and feedback.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with Spring internals, enough to integrate cleanly with Spring Boot applications.
- Experience with JVM startup and footprint techniques (for example class data sharing, jlink, or ahead-of-time compilation) and knowing when they are worth their cost.
- Experience building or operating sidecars, agents, or containerized Java services with tight resource limits.
- Experience with Gradle plugin development or build tooling.
Full description
Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time.
The Mission
The Java Platform Team is moving from "best effort" support to a fully managed, curated "Paved Path" (our recommended, supported standard path) for Java at Netflix. Our Spring Boot based application framework is the most ergonomic choice for most Java development and remains at the center of that path. Some workloads, such as sidecars, and lightweight containers, batch/stream processing jobs, have tight limits on memory and startup time, and they still need the same Netflix platform capabilities.
We make Spring Boot work well in a sidecar or lightweight container, with a leaner footprint and faster startup. We also create standalone, constructible Java libraries that give any Java process access to Netflix platform primitives such as configuration, observability, discovery, and networking. The same libraries work inside our Spring Boot framework and outside it, so there is one source of truth and updates reach every consumer.
The Role
As a Staff Engineer you set technical direction for this area of the Java Platform Team. You own the architecture of the library set, decide what belongs in it and what does not, and raise the bar for the engineers around you. You are hands-on in code and design, and you make the hard calls on API shape, compatibility, and scope.
You will:
- Define the architecture of our lightweight library set. Design builder and constructor based APIs for core platform primitives. Decide how each component runs standalone, inside Spring Boot applications, and in a sidecar or light container, without duplicating logic across those modes.
- Fully support sidecars and light containers. Make Spring Boot applications run well in these environments, for example through minimal starters and trimmed runtimes. Set and defend footprint and startup budgets (small memory, fast startup, small disk footprint). Build benchmarking and regression checks that maintain those budgets across releases. Design the integration and regression testing that lets library changes reach consumers with high confidence and minimal disruption.
- Own interface stability. We commit to long-term support for anything we ship to GA. You set the versioning, compatibility, and side-by-side version strategy, and own the migration cost of any breaking change.
- Work closely with the wider Java Platform Team and partner teams. Make sure our lightweight libraries and the Spring Boot framework share the same underlying components, and help that framework become a better fit for more use cases, for example through minimal starters. Align with Compute, Service Mesh, and other platform teams on gRPC, metrics, and configuration standards for the polyglot Netflix ecosystem.