For a company like Netflix, my guess is, you need to be a world-class expert at some area of scalable backends and/or big data. For example, you need to be a core contributor (in terms of concepts, architecture etc. - not just coding) to projects like Kafka, Cassandra, Spark etc.

They ran the million dollar challenge[1] to increase viewership, thus decreasing churn.

If you could (make a case that you) consistently decrease churn then you'd pay for yourself at that rate.

1: http://www.wired.com/2012/04/netflix-prize-costs/