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. Our sibling teams include Knowledge Foundations (data and domain modeling), Eventing and Communications Platform, Enterprise Workflow Platform, and the Enterprise Developer Paved Road.

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.

The platform operates at significant scale today:

• Approximately 19,500 weekly active users, more than double year over year
• 13.5 million API calls per day, up 97% year over year
• 233 production indices containing 13.3 billion documents, with index count up 74% year over year
• More than 200 client applications consuming the search API, more than double year over year

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.

The platform is at an inflection point, which makes this role particularly important:

• From service to self-service. Graph Search is a powerful platform, but adoption is not yet effortless. Multi-tenancy, data product integration, and self-service onboarding are the next major steps.
• From applications to primitives. The team has deliberately chosen not to build standalone end-user applications. Instead, it provides composable search primitives that enable other teams to build their own products, agents, and experiences while the team owns the underlying platform. Defining and maintaining that boundary, including evaluating when a use case does not belong on the platform, is a key part of the role.
• Advance agentic and semantic search without neglecting the core. Agents are becoming first-class consumers of search, and semantic retrieval and entity grounding are major areas of investment. At the same time, keyword search remains the largest source of user value. The challenge is to advance the platform for emerging AI use cases without under-investing in the fundamentals that users depend on today.
• Build a stronger discipline around impact. The team has an opportunity to become much more rigorous in connecting its investments to measurable business and organizational outcomes. Prioritization should be evidence-backed rather than strictly driven by inbound requests. You’ll also have the opportunity to shape how the team prioritizes its work and measures success.