Podcast Summary: The Pragmatic Engineer — Netflix’s Engineering Culture
Host: Gergely Orosz
Guest: Elizabeth Stone, CTO of Netflix
Date: November 12, 2025
Overview
In this engaging episode, Gergely Orosz sits with Elizabeth Stone, Netflix CTO, for a candid and deep dive into Netflix’s unique engineering culture. The discussion explores the engineering challenges behind running a global entertainment platform, lessons from ground-breaking live events, the principles underpinning Netflix’s famous tech culture, hiring and talent philosophy, unconventional approaches to performance management, and practical uses of AI tools for engineering productivity. The episode is a goldmine for software engineers, tech leaders, or anyone interested in how engineering empowers a company at massive scale.
Main Topics & Key Insights
1. The Scale and Breadth of Engineering at Netflix
- Netflix’s Reach: More than a trillion events captured daily—spanning consumer interactions, studio tooling, payments, ads, games, and partnerships.
"When you add that up, we have more than a trillion events that we're capturing every day." — Elizabeth Stone [00:02]
- Engineering Touchpoints: Technology touches every part of the streaming lifecycle, from studio productions to games, advertising, and commerce systems.
- Unique Tooling: Beyond common systems like payments and ads, Netflix builds custom software for studio productions (e.g., Media Production Suite).
"...took something that was a fairly antiquated, slow and expensive way for media files to travel across creative teams... and really modernized what that looks like." [03:53]
2. Engineering Challenges at Unprecedented Scale
- Media Data Complexity: Managing thousands of concurrent productions means handling vast, complex media files with tight latency constraints, especially for live events.
- Open Connect: Netflix’s custom-built CDN, with over 6,000 locations worldwide, enables high-quality, low-latency content delivery—crucial for both movies and live streaming.
"Open Connect... was a big bet that we made more than 10 years ago to build our own content delivery network." [06:05]
- 'Pitch to Play' Lifecycle: Tech underpins every stage, from greenlighting a title to production, promotion, recommendations, and final delivery.
"Think about from the moment a title is pitched that someone in the content team greenlights... Tech basically underlies that whole life cycle." [09:03]
3. Decentralized, Autonomy-Driven Engineering Culture
- Innovation by ICs: Netflix empowers individual engineers and teams to drive innovation and make architecture decisions, not top-down mandates.
"A lot of autonomy and local judgment in how we build things has allowed us to build this end to end view..." [11:43]
- Adaptation at Scale: Elasticity in how teams work has enabled quick pivots for new initiatives (like live events) despite growth and complexity.
4. Engineering Live Events: Case Study and Lessons
- Rapid Evolution from VOD to Live Streaming:
- First foray: Chris Rock (March 2023).
- Growth: Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing match (Nov 2024) had 65 million concurrent streams, marking a record-breaking scale.
- Team Structure: Self-organizing, cross-functional teams, rapidly learning and iterating under extreme timelines.
- Launch Room Details:
"I was sitting in a room with maybe 30 or 40, both engineers and data scientists... We had our laptops and makeshift screens sitting there." [18:01]
- Temporary dashboards, 40-50 page launch docs, and real-time triage via Google Meet.
- Postmortems & Learning:
"It happens very organically and it's led by the people who are close to the work itself and feel tons of accountability..." [21:18]
- Blameless, team-driven, focus on actionable insights rather than assigning blame.
5. Process vs Autonomy: Rules, Guardrails, and Risk Management
- Minimal Process, Maximum Judgment:
- Pre-live, risk was managed by team discretion. For high-stakes initiatives (e.g., live streaming), more formal tiering and quiet periods were introduced—but only as absolutely necessary to avoid slowing teams.
- Examples:
- Tier 0/Tier 1 application classification used for risk management.
"...if I pass these guidelines, if I've done this testing, I don't need to be in a quiet period, for example during a live event..." [24:53]
6. Hiring and Building a High Bar for Engineering Talent
- Historically Single Engineering Level:
"For the first 25 years... the only software engineering level used to be a senior software engineer." [31:45]
- Talent Density as a Means to Excellence:
- Focus on autonomy, accountability, and a shared drive for excellence.
- As Netflix scaled, introduced more levels to accommodate earlier-career talent and support growth, but cautious to avoid stifling independence or accountability.
- Cultural Values in Pathways:
- Selflessness, good judgment, building for the future, thinking globally, and a strong focus on continuous learning ("Yearn to learn").
7. Performance Management: No Formal Reviews
- No Traditional Perf Process:
"We don't have formal performance reviews, which is probably the first unusual thing..." [36:46]
- Emphasis on timely, candid, ongoing feedback and an annual 360 feedback process.
- Keeper Test:
- Managers ask: “Would I fight to keep this person on my team?” Also applies in reverse—employees assess their own managers.
- Compensation and Advancement:
- Linked to ongoing impact and continuous feedback, not tied to biannual review cycles.
8. Retention and Motivation
- High challenge, high autonomy, and talent density drive engagement and low attrition compared to other Big Tech companies.
"I personally find that people leave when they're not getting the challenges and the fulfillment... or they don't feel like they're adequately recognized..." [42:01]
9. AI Tools: Pragmatic Adoption for Engineering Productivity
- AI Usage at Netflix:
- Teams are encouraged to experiment with various coding assistants; feedback-driven selection for maximum impact.
- Success seen in prototyping, documentation, large code migrations, anomaly detection — freeing engineers for more innovative work.
"Prototyping is a lot faster and actually that's a place where when you think about the cross functional teams across engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, we're hoping that we can actually bootstrap things very quickly." [48:15]
- GenAI Champions:
- Roles within teams to support practical adoption and collect feedback.
10. Welcoming Early Career Engineers
- Recent Change:
"We were starting at 0% in most cases... So we had mostly a level 5 and above population. So we had a huge opportunity to complement the team we had with earlier career talent..." [51:34]
- Balance:
- Still value very senior talent, but see great benefit in new skills and perspectives from new grads and interns, especially native AI fluency.
- “Building from Within”:
- Focus on developing internal talent to progress to senior/leadership roles.
11. Open Source Leadership
- Surprising Investment: One in five engineers involved in open source; Netflix is a founding member of the Open Media alliance.
"...we require 60% less bandwidth, 60% fewer bit rates for same or better quality with a much bigger catalog that comes from our media encoding innovation and having a whole industry that's pushing that benefits anyone who's in the entertainment space and definitely benefits consumers and our members." [55:38]
- Mutual Industry Gain:
- Major contribution in areas like video encoding (recipient of multiple technical Emmys).
12. Advice for New Engineers at Netflix
- Curiosity as a Core Value:
"Curiosity, curiosity, curiosity. ...Just because you're new to Netflix or earlier in the career doesn't mean you're not going to be the source of innovation." [57:25]
- Leverage Community:
- Proactively seek mentorship and ask questions; a collaborative, supportive environment accelerates growth.
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
- On Live Launch Stress:
"I joke with people. I feel like I lost 10 years of my life in that one night because it was so stressful..." — Elizabeth Stone [18:01]
- On Culture Without Rigid Performance Reviews:
"We don't have formal performance reviews... but we do carefully think about feedback, performance expectations, all the things that would feed into Keeper test..." [36:46]
- On Talent Density:
"All the people I work with feel that way. You don't need to tell them what to do. They lean in to try to do the best possible work." [31:45]
- On Open Source Impact:
"Netflix doesn't lose anything, only gain something by contributing to the broader innovation landscape." [56:11]
Key Timestamps
- 00:02 — [Scale of Netflix’s engineering/data]
- 03:53 — [Unique tech—Media Production Suite, Scanline visual effects]
- 06:05 — [Open Connect CDN]
- 09:03 — ["Pitch to Play" lifecycle]
- 13:59 — [Live events: Chris Rock to Paul Tyson; engineering dynamics]
- 18:01 — [Inside the Live event control room]
- 21:18 — [Postmortem and learning culture]
- 24:53 — [Process vs Autonomy; Tiering and quiet periods]
- 31:45 — [Talent density, hiring, and engineering levels]
- 36:46 — [No formal perf reviews; Keeper test and performance management]
- 42:01 — [Retention and engagement]
- 44:47 — [Engineering use of AI tools]
- 48:15 — [Where AI tools help: prototyping, migration, anomaly detection]
- 50:57 — [Opening to early career engineers and building from within]
- 54:04 — [Open source investment and industry contribution]
- 57:25 — [Advice to new engineers at Netflix]
Final Advice for Engineers Considering Netflix
- Be endlessly curious
- Seek mentorship, ask the “why” behind systems
- Embrace ambiguity and autonomy
- Contribute selflessly to the team and broader engineering community
Netflix's culture is demanding and distinct, but rich with opportunities for growth, learning, and making impactful contributions at one of tech’s most ambitious companies.