Senior storage/infra engineer owning PowerScale and NetApp platforms for Netflix's content creation pipeline

This is a senior systems development engineer role on Netflix's Creative Compute and Storage team, owning the architecture, deployment, and lifecycle of large-scale, high-performance storage platforms (Dell PowerScale/OneFS, NetApp/ONTAP) that support content creation (post-production, animation, VFX) globally. It requires 5+ years operating and automating enterprise storage at scale plus strong Terraform/infrastructure-as-code skills.

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What this interview tests

Enterprise storage platform ownership at scale: Dell PowerScale/OneFS and NetApp/ONTAP
File, block, and object storage administration: SMB/NFS, snapshots, replication, tiering, quotas, performance tuning
Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform: modules, state management, provider design for storage automation
Observability for storage fleets: metrics, logging, tracing, capacity/performance dashboards, proactive alerting
Storage migrations, upgrades, and troubleshooting with reliability as the top priority
Translating content-creation workflow needs (post-production, animation, VFX) into infrastructure solutions

Common question themes

Walk through architecting and automating provisioning for a high-performance storage platform with Terraform

Describe tuning or troubleshooting a PowerScale or ONTAP deployment under real production load

How would you build observability into a storage fleet so problems surface before they hit end users

Tell me about a storage migration or upgrade — what was your validation and rollback strategy

How do you decide between file, block, and object storage for a given creative workload

Give an example of dissecting a large infrastructure system into components you optimized individually and together

How candidates describe it

Real Systems Development Engineer 5 - Creative Compute and Storage interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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