Senior Planning & Data Operations Lead

Netflix is one of the world's leading entertainment services, with 283 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time.

Netflix is one of the world's leading streaming entertainment services with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Since the days of DVDs in envelopes, our metadata and ratings teams have brought context to content, analyzing and annotating titles on service to help match titles to members, and help them make the right choices for them and their families. 

Now as Netflix explores a broader world of entertainment – expanding into Games, Ads – we are looking for a Sr Planning and Data Operations lead to bring together all of our work in a rapidly expanding set of complex domains that underpin the member experience, how we launch, classify and merchandise titles, and how we evaluate and train ML and Generative AI models for use in our work.

About the Role 

This is a new role in an old team. Our new Planning & Data Operations (PDO) team sits at the center of Product Metadata and Ratings (PMR), partnering with our specialist content understanding and content rating teams and our local product discovery and promotion teams all around the world to ensure that we have operational and workflow excellence, that we are running a wildly successful business, and that we deliver for partners across the business ranging from policy teams to algo engineers; from content executives to merchandising and creative strategists.

Specifically, PDO is the team within PMR whose focus is on optimizing how we work, enhancing collaboration, mitigating risks, and driving operational innovation. This role requires a strong strategic mindset, analytical rigor, and the ability to execute effectively in a dynamic, cross-functional, matrixed environment working with stakeholders at every altitude. In this role, you will be responsible for leading highly ambitious and ambiguous cross-functional business-critical initiatives, monitoring the health of those initiatives, and identifying opportunities for invention, improvement, and optimization. 

In previous roles you may have been a COO, Chief of Staff, or Director of Operations; you may have led large teams or small, what matters here is not the hierarchy or the authority you had but the impact you drove and the ways in which you delivered it.

The Opportunity

This is a highly impactful & visible role that involves working closely with partners at every altitude across domains (e.g. Product, Finance, Content Understanding, Creative, etc.). As a Planning & Data Operations Manager, you will be a strategic partner and operational lead, working to maximize efficiency, operational effectiveness, and business value across the organization—helping to shape the future of how we operate. This includes continuously improving business processes, systems, and workflows; defining and driving plans that deliver on key business priorities but also overseeing their execution, ensuring business continuity across initiatives and optimal resource utilization.  

The ideal candidate:

• Thrives in ambiguity, enjoys solving complex problems and has a knack for turning chaos into clarity. They are deeply curious, proactive and focused. 

• Can succinctly and broadly communicate what’s important about a problem, potential solutions and why. 

• Is comfortable working in a high-volume, high-quality, deadline-and data-driven environment. They are an excellent cross-functional partner who can relay the importance of this work to colleagues beyond your team, as well as collaborate on unique projects that use tags, technology, metadata, and content insights in new ways. 

• Is flexible, adaptive, resilient and curious in an ever-evolving organizational landscape.

• When presented with a vision/memo/test plan, can effectively and independently break it down into a clear scope, visualize potential solutions, identify critical open questions and proactively collaborate with the appropriate partners to get the clarity needed. They bring people along.

• Has a history of not only developing smart and scalable solutions but also delivering on its execution and evolution. They are a change management superstar. 

• Brings clarity to chaos.
   

Responsibilities:
 

Strategic Partnership & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as a thought partner to teams across product, engineering, data science, marketing and promotion, providing strategic operational planning and insights.

• Act as the primary operational business partner to our partner product managers, ensuring seamless execution of initiatives.

• Collaborate with Finance & Strategy (F&S) to provide critical context, scenario modeling inputs, and prioritization guidance for leadership investment decisions.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: 

• Act as a connective tissue across teams to drive alignment and ensure effective execution of business priorities.

• Collect, analyze, and synthesize data to inform business strategies and identify opportunities for growth or efficiency.

• Design, implement, and refine processes and workflows to improve team or organizational productivity.

• Partner with leadership to assess operational challenges and propose solutions that align with high-level company goals.

• Define, implement, monitor and report on key metrics to measure business health.

• SME and ownership related to workflow strategy, design and operationalization of all PMR workflows. 

• Responsibility for the intake, scoping, planning and resourcing of our multiple AI/algo eval projects, centralising and developing the playbooks we need as we scale. 

Workflow Development & Algorithm Integration

• Identify, model, and operationalize workflow changes required for integrating new algorithms and automation into existing processes.

• Develop resourcing and operationalization plans that account for business continuity across multiple phases (e.g., pilot, soft launch, v1 launch, productization).

• Partner with product managers, engineering, and data science to evaluate the operational impact of algorithmic changes and implement improvements as needed.

• Partner directly with Product Managers to manage HITL (Human-in-the-Loop) evaluation support requests, handling intake, scoping, and resourcing strategy.

Operational Excellence & Risk Management

• Manage dependencies, proactively anticipate and manage risk, and ensure readiness for workflow integration and user training.

• Design, implement, and maintain a standardized system for introducing changes to PMR workflows.

• Lead the PMR operational audit strategy and execution, ensuring continuous improvement and process optimization.

Qualifications 

• Experience establishing and driving operational process across a business unit (e.g. Annual Planning, Quarterly review, Goals management, resource / capacity planning & management, Roadmapping, or Dependencies management) 

• Have strong business mindset with good understanding of how a well oiled “business machine” is supposed to run

• Have acted as a strategic and operational partner to senior leaders. Attributes include:

  • Shine in ambiguous situations

  • See around corners (anticipate bottlenecks, escalate effectively, anticipate and make trade-offs)

  • Influence over authority to promote alignment 

  • Strong communicator at the leadership level

  • Effectively navigate between details and big pictures

  • Strategic thinker

  • Strong organizer & executor

  • Operates effectively across many teams 

• Experience using data and metrics to determine and drive business process improvements

• Experience in driving change management across complex organizational structures

• Experienced in driving complex program or project management, or consulting experience

• Strong judgment and decisiveness when dealing with timely, deadline-driven, content-related issues and concerns

• Excellent written (memos and presentations) and verbal communication skills; timely communication

• Insatiable curiosity to learn new domains, keep up with industry innovation, and constantly ask ‘why’

• Experience working with large data catalogs, human in the loop evaluations, metadata at scale or content analysis workflows is a plus

Generally, our compensation structure consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses. You choose each year how much of your compensation you want in salary versus stock options. To determine your personal top of market compensation, we rely on market indicators and consider your specific job family, background, skills, and experience to determine your compensation in the market range. The range for this role is $70,000-$370,000.

Netflix provides comprehensive benefits including Health Plans, Mental Health support, a 401(k) Retirement Plan with employer match, Stock Option Program, Disability Programs, Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts, Family-forming benefits, and Life and Serious Injury Benefits. We also offer paid leave of absence programs.  Full-time hourly employees accrue 35 days annually for paid time off to be used for vacation, holidays, and sick paid time off. Full-time salaried employees are immediately entitled to flexible time off.

See more detail about our Benefits here.
 

Netflix is a unique culture and environment.  Learn more here.

Inclusion is a Netflix value and we strive to host a meaningful interview experience for all candidates. If you want an accommodation/adjustment for a disability or any other reason during the hiring process, please send a request to your recruiting partner.

We are an equal-opportunity employer and celebrate diversity, recognizing that diversity builds stronger teams. We approach diversity and inclusion seriously and thoughtfully. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, ancestry, national origin, caste, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, age, disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic makeup, marital status, or military service.

Job is open for no less than 7 days and will be removed when the position is filled.