Netflix’s Engineering Culture
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Chaos engineering
13 min read
The article mentions Chaos Monkey, Netflix's famous tool for testing system resilience. Understanding the broader discipline of chaos engineering provides context for Netflix's engineering culture of building reliable systems at scale.
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Content delivery network
14 min read
The article discusses Netflix's Open Connect delivery network, which is a proprietary CDN. Understanding CDN architecture and how global content distribution works provides essential context for Netflix's engineering challenges.
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Reed Hastings
1 min read
Netflix's unique engineering culture, including the 'Keeper Test' and no formal performance reviews, stems from the company culture Reed Hastings built. Understanding the founder provides context for the organizational philosophy Elizabeth Stone describes.
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Listen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom.
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• Linear — The system for modern product development. When most companies hit real scale, they start to slow down, and are faced with “process debt.” This often hits software engineers the most. Companies switch to Linear to hit a hard reset on this process debt – ones like Scale cut their bug resolution in half after the switch. Check out Linear’s migration guide.
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In this episode
What’s it like to work as a software engineer inside one of the world’s biggest streaming companies?
In this special episode recorded at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Gatos, I sit down with Elizabeth Stone, Netflix’s Chief Technology Officer. Before becoming CTO, Elizabeth led data and insights at Netflix and was VP of Science at Lyft. She brings a rare mix of technical depth, product thinking, and people leadership.
We discuss what it means to be “unusually responsible” at Netflix, how engineers make decisions without layers of approval, and how the company balances autonomy with guardrails for high-stakes projects like Netflix Live. Elizabeth shares how teams self-reflect and learn from outages and failures, why Netflix doesn’t do formal performance reviews, and what new grads bring to a company known for hiring experienced engineers.
This episode offers a rare inside look at how Netflix engineers build, learn, and lead at a global scale.
Interesting details about Netflix
A “top” company for engineering talent and retention. From this report by Signal Fire, Netflix is in the far right corner of this chart, meaning the company hires strong engineering talent, and retention is above industry average:
Hiring of new grads. Netflix has only hired senior software engineers for the first 25 years of the company — up to 2023, when the company introduced engineering levels. Netflix now hires new grads: and because they started from 0% new grad ratio, they
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