Software Engineer L5 - AI Observability & Agent Evaluation

Overview

Build the frameworks behind Netflix's AI Observability platform, covering model performance, LLM and agentic evaluation, and vendor integration surfaces, as a hands-on senior engineer on the AI Observability team.

What you'll do

• Build the observability framework and platform capabilities that give ML and GenAI systems metrics, logs, and distributed traces across online inference, batch scoring, feature pipelines, and agent orchestration, so teams can instrument their systems consistently.
• Build the primitives that let teams monitor model performance (accuracy, calibration, error rates), data quality, drift, and degradation on their own systems, rather than monitoring individual models yourself.
• Build and extend evaluation frameworks for LLM and agentic systems that support response quality, grounding and hallucination, task success, tool-use and trajectory correctness, and LLM-as-a-judge and human-in-the-loop scoring, giving teams reusable building blocks to define and run their own evals.
• Lead build-vs-buy evaluations for observability and eval tooling, and own the SDKs, connectors, and APIs that integrate vendor platforms into a consistent, well-supported interface, so ML and product teams can onboard models and agents with minimal friction.
• Build reusable libraries, SDKs, and templates that make observability and evaluation the default for new systems ("observability-by-default"), lowering the barrier for teams to instrument and evaluate their work.
• Provide the dashboarding, alerting, and SLO/SLI building blocks (plus sensible out-of-the-box templates) that teams use to track model performance, latency, cost, and reliability.

What you'll need

• Experience in software, AI/ML, or platform engineering, with hands-on time in production observability, monitoring, or ML/LLM evaluation.
• Proven track record of designing standards, libraries, SDKs, or frameworks that other teams build on and adopt, reflecting a platform and enablement mindset rather than shipping features for a single use case.
• Strong coding skills in Python and at least one of Java, Go, or Scala, with experience building production services.
• Practical experience operating ML models in production (online serving and/or batch), including drift, model performance, and data quality.
• Hands-on experience with modern observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, ELK/OpenSearch, Jaeger/Tempo, or similar).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, microservices, and at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ability to work cross-functionally with ML, data, infra, and product teams, and to communicate clearly about system behavior, quality, and risk.
• Experience with vendor integration and VPC deployment.
• AI-Native Engineering Mindset who uses AI tools as a core part of their own workflow to accelerate design, development, testing, and code review.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with ML/LLM observability and evaluation tools (e.g., Arize, Braintrust, LangFuse, Weights & Biases, Galileo, Vertex AI Model Monitoring, SageMaker Model Monitor).
• Experience building or shipping LLM/GenAI applications and evaluating them: prompt/result logging, evaluation metrics, LLM-as-a-judge, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Experience evaluating agentic systems: tool use, multi-step reasoning, and trajectory/task-success measurement.

Details

• Location: Washington, remote.