Supercharging our Data Scientists’ Productivity at Netflix

Netflix's unique culture affords its data scientists an extraordinary amount of freedom. They are expected to build, deploy, and operate large machine learning workflows autonomously with only limited experience in systems or data engineering. Metaflow, our ML framework (now open-source at metaflow.org), provides them with delightful abstractions to manage their project's lifecycle end-to-end, leveraging the strengths of the cloud: elastic compute and high-throughput storage. In this talk, we will have one of our data scientists working in Content Demand Modeling present one of the challenges that they faced earlier this year. We will use that as a backdrop to present the human-centric design principles that govern the design of Metaflow and its internals. Finally, we will tie up the presentation outlining the team's experience using Metaflow and the impact of their work.