26 February 2021
Phillipa Avery
Engineering Manager – Java Platform, Netflix
Bachelor of Information Technology (Advanced Computer & Information Science), Honours
Netflix’s cultural influence is undeniable. The subscription-based media service has well and truly changed the media landscape as one of the first adopters of internet streaming technology.
Now – off the back of their award-winning original content and simultaneous releases – think Stranger Things and their newest most watched show Bridgeton spearheading the term ‘binge-watching’ – Netflix has become the largest entertainment and media company by market capitalisation.
This rise to prominence and success is largely thanks to their impressive workforce, including University of South Australia Bachelor of Information Technology graduate, Phillipa Avery.
Phillipa joined Netflix in 2013 – just three years after it began offering a standalone streaming service separate from their original DVD rentals – and has contributed and seen firsthand how the platform has turned into the massive international juggernaut it is today.
Throughout her almost eight years at the company, Phillipa has played a key role in Netflix’s development making streaming at Netflix possible as a Senior Software Engineer for the Playback Services and Experimentation Platform teams, and as Engineering Manager of the Service Networking team.
Working on the Playback Services team, Phillipa’s role involved writing, migrating, and maintaining a number of tier one web services for serving licenses and other playback requirements, ensuring Netflix customers are able to enjoy their streaming experience quickly and securely.
She was also given the opportunity to be a Technical Lead for the creation and integration of the Netflix Downloads feature, which was released in 2016, architecting and managing the new backend flow and infrastructure for the feature.
Currently as the Engineering Manager leading the Java Runtime Platform team, serving a large user base of Engineers across the entire ecosystem, Phillipa supports the many developers at Netflix by providing them with common frameworks, tools, and best practices.
As the manager, she is able to implement her technical expertise in the domain to guide decisions on what the team is striving to achieve in the short and long-term. Importantly, she also makes sure the right context is being shared to the relevant people and align on the various initiatives across the company.
When not contributing to the vital behind the scenes technology at Netflix, Phillipa enjoys time with her family in the beautiful Bay Area where she’s based in California, and recently took some time to delve deeper into her career path and, of course, her very own Netflix recommendations with us.
Did you always want to become an engineer and work in IT – when do you think this love, or aptitude, for this space began? Was ending up at a company like Netflix always the plan?
I was always interested in engineering but took a number of years off between high school and university where I tried a number of different trades. In the end, computer science was where I found my true passion – and I was fortunate to find something that I am both good at and enjoy doing. .
At UniSA I also spent some time as a Tutor and Course Manager. Teaching gave me key skills to be able to confidently represent my understanding and expertise to others in a way that is concise and easy to comprehend. This is a skill I use daily as a leader, through meetings, document writing and coaching others.
Following that I continued on to a postdoctoral degree and then moved to the US to undertake a postgrad research position. After completing the postgrad work, I wanted to work in an industry where I would have a direct impact on customers and would be able to see that impact on a daily basis.
I was fortunate to be hired at Netflix relatively early in the streaming days and have seen the company grow into the global phenomenon that it is today.
It is my dream job and I still love what I do on a daily basis.
You now lead a team of engineers – did you fall into this kind of role or did you always aspire to lead a team in a more managerial capacity?
I actively avoided the role for a while actually. I tried it for six months, then went back to being an engineer for six months, before deliberately deciding to make the career change.
It is a very different role, and it changes from being an individual success story to wanting to drive the success of others. While I do occasionally miss the satisfaction of sitting down in the zone and hammering out a solution to a hard problem, the joy I get from helping others achieve their goals and setting strategic vision for the business is what drove me to make the change.
You joined Netflix in 2013 – quite early on in their rise to prominence – what has it been like watching it grow into the cultural touchstone it has?
Netflix is renowned in the tech industry for having a pretty unique tech culture and seeing how the company has adapted that culture in a scaling business model, has been eye-opening. While we’ve seen some critically important changes to the culture – like the addition of Inclusion & Diversity as part of our core culture items – overall, the culture has continued to thrive even as we grow.
The technology has also changed dramatically over the years. We were one of the pioneers of cloud microservice architectures in the industry, and as a result we suffered some of the costs as first adopters.
Watching the tools that grew out of this (chaos engineering, deployment management, insights, etc.), and being part of their creation, has been hugely rewarding. I look forward to seeing how we continue to grow and maintain our innovative edge.
This past year has definitely been one for the books and streaming services are some of the companies that have seen growth. How has this year been for you at Netflix?
Netflix has always been situated almost exclusively in Los Gatos (California) for engineering. We didn’t do remote work, and we relied a lot on ‘hallway conversations’ and ad-hoc communications for context sharing and alignment. This last year has been a huge growth area in remote support for the tech industry at large.
At Netflix, we are now open to US engineering remote hires long-term and are seeking to improve our asynchronous communication processes to reflect these changes. It’s definitely difficult, but I think it’s going to be really beneficial in the years to come.
Netflix has definitely cornered the streaming market, but even with an increasingly competitive landscape, how do you stay ahead of competitors? What are you as a team working towards?
As a company we have been revolutionising studio technology over the last few years. This is a key mechanism to stay ahead of the curve in terms of production quality and speed. We also rely heavily on A/B testing to make decisions on what customers like best for the product, and we are always innovating on new features and technology.
The Java Platform team are working to create the underlying service infrastructure supporting the above as agile and painless as possible.
What is it like living and working in the Bay Area – do you have a favourite thing about the San Francisco/Silicon Valley area?
The Bay Area is great, it pretty much has everything I would ever want in a single location (except the beaches aren’t as nice as Australia). The only downsides are the cost of living, and the amount of people living here. My favourite thing would be that you could go to the snow and visit the beach all in a day trip.
Do you have any personal favourite Netflix recommendations?
I’m hanging out for season two of The Witcher and Dragon’s Dogma is a fun binge while I wait.
Though I don’t catch a lot of TV these days, I do like bingeing some Anime while I’m on the treadmill. Luckily our Anime catalogue is really pretty good currently!
