Want to break Netflix? It'll pay you to do the job

'Senior Chaos Engineer' sought to inflict all sorts of nasty, nasty, pain

In 2012, Netflix open sourced a tool called Chaos Monkey that it uses to test its networks and systems by trying to break them with attacks based on all sorts of chaotic events.

Now the company wants to hire a “Senior Chaos Engineer” to do the same … only more painfully.

As the company's job ad puts it “... your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to create the chaos suite of tools that the entire company relies on for failure injection and outage prevention.”

Netflix recently declared an intention “to double down on chaos aka failure-injection”, so the new job isn't unexpected.

The company says “Chaos Engineering is entirely focused on controlled failure injection” and advises that would-be Chaos Engineers will have “built and run complex distributed systems at web-scale” and “Enjoy breaking things, but know how to fix them as well”. You'll also need “Exceptional Java, C# or C++, object oriented design and programming skills” and “Solid understanding of data structures, concurrency and algorithms.”

If that sounds like you, don't forget that Netflix is a very demanding workplace. As this presentation about the company's values explains, Netflix considers itself to be “a pro sports team, not a kid's recreational team.”

That position means “Netflix leaders hire, develop, and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position”. If you're not a star, the company's policy is that “adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” ®