“Netflix posts AI job paying up to $840,000” made headlines this month and for good reason.
In the middle of a cost-conscious year across both Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Netflix has opened a series of artificial-intelligence positions that rival the pay scales of top tech firms.
All of the AI roles including senior engineering, data, and product-management positions, are available as fully remote roles within the United States. Netflix’s job postings describe positions that blend engineering depth with creative application, spanning machine learning, data infrastructure, advertising, gaming, and internal productivity systems.
A Netflix spokesperson recently told The Verge that the company employs “hundreds of people in machine learning and personalization,” and its new AI roles are part of ongoing investments in “content discovery, production, and advertising systems.”
A New Kind of Product Role
One of the most high-profile listings is for a Product Manager, Generative AI, a fully remote role paying between $240,000 and $700,000 annually. Posted in late September, the position sits inside Netflix’s Productivity Assistant team, an internal AI platform designed to automate everyday workflows for its 13,000 employees.
The role calls for at least six years of product-management experience and a strong grasp of machine-learning fundamentals such as model training, fine-tuning, embeddings, and evaluation metrics. The product manager will lead the development and execution of Netflix’s generative-AI roadmap, working with engineering, privacy, and legal teams to deploy new tools responsibly and at scale.
Netflix’s Productivity Assistant is already in active use across the company. According to Netflix engineers, it has reduced the hundreds of hours employees once spent searching internal systems for information or resolving support requests. The platform now supports knowledge management, feedback analysis, and automated IT assistance and the company is layering in generative features to expand its capabilities further.
Engineering the AI Backbone
Behind these applications lies a growing network of infrastructure roles. A Software Engineer (L4/L5) – Model Serving Systems position, open to remote U.S. applicants, offers $100,000 to $720,000 and focuses on building the computational platform that powers Netflix’s machine-learning models. This team maintains the systems that serve both consumer-facing algorithms and large-language-model deployments in real time.
On the advertising side, a Machine Learning Engineer (L5) position for Ads Algorithms offers between $170,000 and $720,000. The engineer will develop and scale ad-personalization models that determine which ads users see, using languages like Python, Java, or Scala and frameworks such as REST and GraphQL.
Higher up the technical hierarchy, Netflix is hiring an Engineering Manager, Data – Personalization, with pay ranging from $360,000 to $920,000. The manager will oversee teams responsible for maintaining the datasets that train Netflix’s recommender and personalization systems. Tools like Spark, Kafka, and Flink are at the core of the operation, reflecting the sophistication of Netflix’s data environment.
Data, Security, and Advertising
Netflix’s AI expansion also extends to its data and security operations. A Data Engineer (L5), earning $170,000 to $720,000, will design and scale data pipelines for both batch and real-time analytics. A Security Engineer (L5) on the Security Incident Response Team will earn a similar range, bringing at least five years of experience across detection, incident management, or identity security.
At the senior-most level, the company is recruiting a Director of Ads Data Engineering, one of the highest-paying roles currently listed, offering between $610,000 and $1.87 million. The position oversees the data systems that power Netflix’s advertising platform, a growing segment of the company’s revenue model and manages teams responsible for privacy compliance, measurement, and pipeline reliability.
Localization, Analytics, and Creative Operations
Netflix’s technology hiring also extends beyond data infrastructure. A Full-Stack Software Engineer (L4) in Product Localization Engineering, based in Los Gatos, California, is being offered $170,000 to $720,000. The role involves building microservices and user interfaces that make Netflix’s platform accessible in multiple languages and cultural contexts.
An Analytics Engineer (L5) opening in the same division, offering the same salary range, focuses on designing analytic tools and scalable data systems to improve localization efficiency and regional operations.
AI in Gaming
Netflix’s most attention-grabbing AI role, however, comes from an unlikely corner: gaming. The company recently listed a Director of Generative AI for Games, based in Los Angeles, with a salary range of $430,000 to $840,000 plus stock and benefits. The posting requires at least ten years of gaming-industry experience and deep knowledge of the full game-development lifecycle. The director will define and lead Netflix’s generative-AI strategy for its gaming division, collaborating with studios and technology teams to integrate AI tools into creative and production processes.
The move follows restructuring earlier this year at Netflix’s Oxenfree developer, Night School Studio, acquired in 2021. The new listing suggests the company is consolidating its gaming efforts around advanced creative tooling.
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has been explicit about AI’s growing role in production. “Our creators are already seeing the benefits in production through pre-visualization, shot planning, and visual effects,” he said.
How Netflix Is Rewriting Pay Rules
The salary ranges across Netflix’s listings are the product of a pay philosophy that the company has practiced for years but is now drawing attention in the AI era.
Netflix doesn’t offer annual bonuses. Instead, employees choose how to split their pay between salary and stock each year. More notably, the company doesn’t ask candidates for their previous compensation, a question that most employers use as an anchor for offers.
“Most companies begin a negotiation by asking, ‘What’s your current CTC?’ Netflix’s question is different: ‘What is this role worth to us?’” one internal source familiar with the company’s hiring philosophy said.
If a role is valued internally at $700,000, that’s the offer even if the candidate’s previous job paid half that. It’s a system designed to remove negotiation bias and standardize compensation based on value, not history. The approach has helped Netflix hire senior AI engineers from major hyperscalers, data scientists from financial institutions, and creative technologists from gaming and design firms.
The policy reflects Netflix’s broader “top-of-market” principle: pay whatever it takes to attract the best talent and hold them accountable for performance at that level. It’s an unusual approach in entertainment, but one that has long defined the company’s operating culture.
A Broader Hiring Pattern
Taken together, Netflix’s current openings point to a deliberate buildout of AI expertise across every operational layer. The company is hiring for infrastructure, personalization, advertising, security, localization, productivity, and gaming, each role designed to strengthen specific systems already in use.
The listed salary ranges from $700,000 and some nearing $2 million which positions Netflix among the highest-paying recruiters of AI professionals in the United States. Every role is active and listed on the company’s careers portal, showing a continued effort to scale its AI workforce.
Netflix’s hiring documents describe an organization where AI is not a single department but a shared capability woven through multiple teams. The approach aligns with how the company now manages personalization, content recommendations, visual effects, and even the way its employees work day to day.
As Ted Sarandos put it, “This is real people doing real work with better tools.”
