Product Manager, Developer Platform - Application Development Platforms

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 Developer Platform sits within the Infrastructure Engineering organization to amplify the productivity and business impact of Netflix engineers by providing a cohesive developer platform that optimizes developer experience, automates workflows, manages complexity, and accelerates the development, delivery, operations, and maintenance of high-quality software. Our mission is to enable Netflix to scale effectively and evolve rapidly by providing highly reliable, performant, secure, and flexible developer tools, services, and infrastructure. Ultimately, we aim for Netflix engineers to spend less time on repetitive engineering tasks, unnecessary complexity, and undifferentiated heavy lifting so they can focus on helping Netflix entertain the world.

We are looking for a highly technical product manager to drive the vision and strategy for our Application Development Platforms within our centrally supported language ecosystems: Java, JavaScript/TypeScript and Python. The initial focus will be on the Java ecosystem with expansion over time to other languages and ecosystems.

Your primary mission is to keep developers in the flow during application development for the thousands of existing services, data processing jobs and user interfaces as well as the dozens that are created each day. You will deliver well defined and supported golden paths for developers that reduce cognitive load, increase software delivery velocity, improve reliability and alleviate the toil of software maintenance.

You will be responsible for the core components that enable this development, including:

• Application frameworks (i.e. Spring Boot, React, FastAPI)

• Build & test systems (i.e. Gradle, Vite, Junit, uv, TestContainers, pytest, Jest)

• Libraries SDLC and dependency management

• Stability, Performance, and Adoption of the latest supported runtime, frameworks and tools

As the Product Manager for Application Development Platforms, you will have the following responsibilities:

• Drive Product Vision and Strategy: Deeply understand and triangulate across customer needs, developer productivity metrics, operational data, and external industry innovation to shape the vision and strategy for Netflix’s JVM ecosystem and Java application development offerings, ensuring they maximize business and developer impact.

• Roadmap & Alignment: Partner closely with senior engineering leaders and stakeholders to define a forward-looking roadmap. Align on priorities and trade-offs that support Netflix’s technology strategy.

• Execution & Delivery: Develop product roadmaps in partnership with engineering teams that execute on your vision. Clearly articulate problems to be solved, and see features through from idea to launch.

• Metrics-Driven Improvement: Define key success measures (e.g., build times, time to deploy, framework migration progress, performance metrics) and drive experiments or initiatives to continuously improve those metrics, fostering a metrics-driven mindset for developer productivity.

• User Engagement: Create strong partnerships with Netflix engineers through regular outreach and feedback loops. Gather input via interviews, surveys, and usage data to deeply understand their workflow challenges. Champion the voice of the developer.

• Technical Excellence & Reliability: Drive technical excellence in our Java application framework and runtime systems. Ensure these systems are highly reliable, secure, and performant.

• Industry Awareness & Build vs. Buy: Stay informed about advancements in languages ecosystems, application frameworks, and build tooling. Evaluate opportunities to incorporate cutting-edge tools or practices and conduct thoughtful buy-vs-build analyses.

• Prioritization & Focus: Prioritize effectively to maximize impact, balancing quick wins with foundational investments, and user experience improvements with technical scalability. Maintain clarity on short-term vs. long-term goals.

Experience & Skills:

• 8+ years of Product Management experience (or equivalent technical role), with a proven track record of managing and evolving a broad product portfolio and driving product vision and strategy in a complex, technical domain.

• Strong technical knowledge and depth of application development fundamentals, the JVM ecosystem, modern application frameworks, build systems, and dependency management methodologies.

• A healthy blend of deep technical knowledge with a customer-focused mindset and empathy for engineers. You must be comfortable discussing topics like design trade-offs and system quality attributes (scalability, reliability, performance, security) with engineering teams.

• Demonstrated passion for developer platforms, tools, workflows, and infrastructure, staying up-to-date on industry best practices in DevOps/DevEx.

• Strategic thinking that can connect customer use cases and pain points to innovative technology solutions, thinking holistically about the end-to-end experience.

• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders at all levels and navigate complex organizational boundaries.

• Comfortable applying a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to define success, prioritize problems, and measure impact.

We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity of thought and background builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

Our culture is unique, and we live by our values, so it’s worth learning more about Netflix culture.

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

• Backstage in the wild (podcast)

• Telltale: Netflix Application Monitoring Simplified (techblog)

• Machine Learning for a Better Developer Experience (techblog)

• Managed Delivery: Bringing Infrastructure as Code to Spinnaker (video)

Some other links for our org: 

• How We Build Code at Netflix 

• Towards True Continuous Integration

• Evolving Continuous Integration at Netflix

• How Netflix Autoscales CI

• Devtools at Netflix: Culture, Speed and Innovation

• Baking Bitbucket in the AWS Cloud at Netflix

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 $240,000 - $725,000.
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 detail about our Benefits here.
Netflix is a unique culture and environment.  Learn more here.

Inclusion is 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.