Prodicle Passport

Prodicle Passport is the authentication and access gateway for Netflix's production tools. It authenticates a user and routes them into the right applications and onboarding. Most importantly, it draws a hard line between the external production workforce (cast, crew, vendors) and Netflix's own employees, who sign in through entirely separate paths so production access never blurs into corporate identity.

I worked on Passport as an engineer through its second major version: backend, integrations, and performance work that the rest of the suite depended on.

A production is a temporary organization. It spins up fast, pulls together a large, transient workforce of people who don't work for Netflix, runs for a season, and winds down. Each of those people needs secure, scoped access to sensitive tools, but they can't be treated as corporate employees or share an internal single-sign-on built for staff. So the suite needed its own identity layer, and that layer had to be both secure and fast.

The headline effort during my time was launching Passport v2 and making the application dramatically faster:

• New backend APIs to support new front-end functionality, plus integrations connecting to Netflix endpoints to pull down fresh data.
• A major performance overhaul. Navigating to the site had sometimes taken 15 to 20 seconds; I brought that down to under 1 to 2 seconds.
• Async processing. I installed and wired up the shared prodicle_core library and Sidekiq, moving work to asynchronous calls.
• Test coverage and cleanup. I raised coverage across the app, refactored poorly-written code, and cleared out bugs surfaced by support.

Underneath, Passport's job is the trust boundary for the whole toolkit: federated, OAuth-based sign-in that keeps external production users cleanly separated from Netflix staff and routes them into the tools and onboarding they need.

Passport is invisible when it works, which is exactly the point. It's the trust boundary for the entire production toolkit, and the first thing every production worker touches each day. Making it both secure and genuinely fast meant thousands of production workers could get to their tools in seconds instead of staring at a 20-second login.

Core technologies on this project: