Netflix Working on Open API To Foster 3rd Party Applications

Matt discovered an interesting job posting on Craigslist for Senior Software Engineer— Open API’s:

THE OPPORTUNITY

Today Netflix has, within our base of almost 7 million customers, more than 1 million customers who participate in a vibrant and rapidly growing community of movie lovers. Netflix is committed to nurturing that community as well as embarking on a focused effort to integrate Netflix's service and community into existing web sites and social networks around the internet.

We have tools and resources not frequently seen in “start up” companies, but the Developer Web Services team at Netflix is exactly that – an incubated start-up, with many of the same attributes but many excellent benefits.

The Developer Web Services team’s charter is to enable 3rd parties to integrate aspects of the Netflix service into their own applications. To support this goal, the team is developing a Netflix Web Service API for 3rd party developers and is seeking a senior web engineer to contribute to the effort.

If you are into REST API’s and supporting the development of mashups and widgets, this is the job for you. The successful candidate will have strong object-oriented design and development expertise and experience developing highly scalable, multi-tier, web systems. The person fulfilling this role will work closely with other internal development teams and support external developers, so strong interpersonal skills are a must. Experience developing RESTful API’s is a plus.

There are a number of excellent 3rd party programs for Netflix, but they are "hacks" and are not using a formal API to access the Netflix website. This could enable the development of programs, widgets, mashups, websites and more. It'll be interesting to see what Netflix includes in the API, and what developers do with it.

Comments

[Sam]

"Today Netflix has, within our base of almost 7 million customers,"

This seems to indicate that the posting has been open for quite a while (or they just cut-and-pasted from an old listing).

[Wade Menard]

Wow, what interesting timing. Just this past week I started hacking on a mashup application of my own that matches upcoming movies on TV with Netflix recommendations. It would be lovely to have a supported and "legal" API to use.

[Blazie]

Is this just for queue management or does this extend to Watch Now as well?

[Edward R Murrow]

Here's an SDK that's dope:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/