Netflix’s Engineering Culture

The Pragmatic Engineer

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Netflix’s Engineering Culture

Peek inside Netflix’s engineering culture with CTO Elizabeth Stone, as she shares how the company has no formal performance reviews, learns from failures, and builds at a global scale.

Gergely Orosz

Nov 12, 2025

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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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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 have a lot more space to play with. Tech companies hiring more interns and new grads is a recent trend we’ve observed.

No formal performance review process. At most tech companies, the annual or bi-annual perf process is heavyweight, and takes away easily a month of focus from engineering managers, and many engineers as well. Netflix doesn’t have a heavyweight process: instead, they put continuous feedback in place, and a few lightweight check-ins, including the Keeper Test. They also have an annual 360 review process. This is used as a “safety net,” and sounds like a lightweight feedback process, meant to highlight issues that continuous feedback would not catch.

Areas where AI tools work well for Netflix — these are these:

Prototyping
Documenting code
Working on large migrations
Detecting issues (anomaly detection and root cause analysis)

Elizabeth emphasized how they don’t see AI as a “silver bullet:” they experiment with tools, and have observed them to have come a long way in usefulness, from a few years ago.

Unexpectedly heavy open source investment. Netflix has won 9 Emmy awards for open source contributions — mostly for video steaming contributions.

Across all of Big Tech, Netflix has the highest percentage of all engineers contribute to open source: about 20% of them. This was a surprising fact for me to learn, and we went into details in the podcast: