Senior Product Designer, Data Platform

Senior Product Designer, Data Platform at Netflix

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, Data Platform 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

Key skills/competency

• Product Design
• Data Platform
• UX/UI Design
• Infrastructure Engineering
• Data Movement
• Online Data Stores
• System Design
• Workflow Optimization
• Figma
• Cross-functional Collaboration