Senior Product Designer, Data Platform - Online Data Stores and Movement Platform

At Netflix, our mission is to entertain the world. Together, we are writing the next episode - pushing the boundaries of storytelling, global fandom and making the unimaginable a reality. We are a dream team obsessed with the uncomfortable excitement of discovering what happens when you merge creativity, intuition and cutting-edge technology. Come be a part of what’s next.

The Netflix Infrastructure Engineering organization drives business growth and innovation through a robust platform essential to Netflix’s scale and operations. Our Data Platform supports the full data lifecycle—from online data stores and movement to analytics—enabling data practitioners to build and use reliable datasets and insights with speed and confidence. It powers data‑driven decisions at global scale, letting teams focus on what truly matters: helping Netflix entertain the world.

The Opportunity

We’re seeking a Senior Product Designer to shape the next generation of data movement (pipelines/jobs) and online data store (ODS) experiences at Netflix. You’ll help software engineers, data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers—and on‑call owners—move from change intent to reliable outcomes: configure and validate pipelines, observe and troubleshoot runs, evolve schemas safely, make ODS operations self‑serve and safe (e.g., capacity/index changes with guardrails), and set up automatic syncing between ODS and analytics, in addition to streamlining the customer experience across ODS and Data Movement products.

You will focus on end‑to‑end workflows such as:

• Administering and evolving online data stores, self‑serve: safe capacity and index/schema changes with guardrails; paved paths for common maintenance

• Operator and launch experiences for online data stores: privileged updates with approvals/audit; provisioning, discovery, and adoption of new stores (e.g., search); read‑safe data exploration and verification to confirm data appears as expected after creation or fixes (e.g., sample/lookup).

• Designing and running pipelines and data flows: authoring and review, scheduling, handling retries/backoffs and backfills, managing runs with clear dependency views (directed acyclic graphs, DAGs), and supporting batch/streaming movement including change data capture (CDC)/replication and automatic syncing

• Diagnosing and fixing issues faster: pipeline health at a glance; freshness, lag, throughput, and error signals; guided triage that links runs, logs, metrics, lineage, config diffs, and data samples

Your work will reduce cognitive load, build trust, and speed safe change—for example, making pipeline setup and validation straightforward, surfacing actionable run signals, and previewing the impact of schema changes before they ship. You design for coherence across UI, CLI/IDE, and APIs with one mental model, and apply pragmatic AI‑assistance (incident summaries, natural‑language filters, config‑diff explanations). 

If you’re passionate about solving complex, technical design problems in data infrastructure—and want your work to directly influence how Netflix ships reliable, data‑powered experiences at scale—we’d love to talk to you.

What You Will Do

Design Vision and Strategy

• Shape and own design for ODS and movement platform; creating intuitive workflows that enhance data practitioner and software engineer productivity and delight

• Contribute to and help drive adoption of patterns and components for operational, data‑dense UIs (runs, pipelines, lineage, diffs) that scale across the platform

• Identify opportunities for innovation through research, incident analysis, and technical insight; sequence delivery for measurable impact

• Create cohesive, end‑to‑end experiences with guardrails over gates (paved paths, templates, defaults) to reduce errors

• Partner with product and engineering to define and improve how we measure experiences

• Anticipate emerging needs and help frame design problems early

Design Leadership and Execution

• Drive end‑to‑end design for interdependent workflows

• Craft and validate prototypes that effectively communicate solutions

• Establish scalable design practices and foundational patterns

• Scope and negotiate realistic deliverables with partners

• Mentor designers and partner teams; help grow shared understanding and adoption of effective design practices

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Co‑create strategy with product and engineering leadership to drive critical initiatives for your product area

• Facilitate workshops with technical stakeholders; build consensus on implementation, trade‑offs, and sequencing

• Articulate compelling design solutions and decision rationale to senior leadership, connecting technical challenges to business outcomes

• Lead through influence across teams to ensure coherent, cross‑surface experiences (UI, IDE/CLI, APIs)

What We’re Looking For

If you’re excited about this role but don’t meet every single requirement, we encourage you to apply. We value potential, transferable experience, and a learning mindset.

Essential Experience and Skills

• 5+ years as a Product Designer (or equivalent experience)

• Experience designing orchestration and/or data movement tools, databases, developer/data platform tools, or analogous complex technical products

• Strong portfolio showing system‑level product work and the impact of your design leadership, including initiatives that span multiple teams

• Proven track record of leading design initiatives from concept to launch

• Proficient in design tools (Figma, etc.) and prototyping technologies

• Strong systems thinking and ability to design scalable solutions for complex data/analytics challenges

Leadership and Collaboration

• Successfully led design strategy for complex technical products

• Proven track record of influencing and aligning cross-functional partners without direct authority

• Ability to navigate ambiguity, create clarity, and move complex initiatives forward with partners

• Excellence in communicating design decisions to technical audiences

• Demonstrated success in mentoring designers and improving team practices

• Strong ability to work autonomously and drive initiatives independently

• Skill in sequencing and communicating long-term vision through incremental steps

• Ability to collaborate effectively with engineers (coding skills not required)

Technical Understanding

• Literacy in data/analytics and software engineering workflows (e.g., Git‑ and DSL/YAML‑based config with tests, docs, CI, pre‑commit validation); empathy for code‑first users in IDE/CLI

• Fluency in orchestration and data movement: pipelines/DAGs (dependency graphs), runs/retries/backfills, streaming (e.g., Kafka/Flink/Spark), CDC/replication, and Zero ETL

• Familiarity with online data stores (e.g., key‑value, search, relational, caching) and integration with analytical destinations (e.g., Apache Iceberg), including TTL and consistency considerations

• Strength designing data‑dense, system‑oriented interfaces (lineage/dependency graphs, run trees, schema diffs) with embedded trust signals (freshness, status, ownership, change history, SLO/SLA)

• Understanding of permissions/entitlements, data contracts, and compliance constraints and their UX implications

• Applied AI/ML‑enhanced experiences a plus (e.g., conversational queries, guided analysis)

Values

• Continuous learner passionate about design excellence and culture

• Self-motivated and autonomous

• Mature approach to giving and receiving feedback

• Collaborative and ego-free in technical discussions

• Comfortable with ambiguity and driving clarity

More About Infrastructure Engineering @ Netflix

• MIT CODE 2024 Practitioners Panel: Design & User Experience Perspectives (video)

• Netflix’s Distributed Counter Abstraction (techblog)

• Unifying the Netflix engineering experience with a federated platform console (video)

• Incremental Processing using Netflix Maestro and Apache Iceberg (techblog)

• Lessons from designing Netflix’s experimentation platform (video)

• Full Cycle Developers at Netflix -- Operate What You Build (techblog)

• Netflix Data Engineering Summit (techblog)

Generally, our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $350,000.00 - $520,000.00. This compensation range will vary based on location.

Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs. Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off. See more details about our Benefits here.

Netflix is a unique culture and environment. Learn more here.

Inclusionis a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.