The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Apr 2016
Interview
I had a recruiter phone-screen, a manager phone- screen, followed by an onsite.
The onsite had a recruiter in-person, 3 tech rounds and a round with the manager.
My interviews went well and I still cannot fathom why I was not offered a job.
I did well on all the technical interviews especially with their senior-most engineer.
I honestly feel that the manager did not have a clear hiring bar.
I suspect there was some negativity from him.
He should have had sufficient data about how proficient I was, given that we interacted on-phone and on-site.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
My first onsite was with the recruiter. The recruiter was very pleasant and we talked about why I was interested in Netflix and other companies that I was exploring for a job. He wanted to know why I was leaving my current company. I was quite upfront with the recruiter. He seemed to appreciate the directness.
Second round was with the manager.
It wasn't a coding session, but more of a design/data structures problem specifically for the Netflix CDN scale. This seemed a bit excessive since I had already interacted with the manager twice and had done his take-home test.
Not much discussion about what my role in the team could be.
Lot of vague technical questions were asked.
Third round was with the senior-most engineer on the team. It was the best interview experience I had that day. Areas covered: Locks, concurrency, system design..
We had a great conversation about implementing low-level locks and designing a Netflix service that prevents users from sharing accounts. The interviewer was articulate and well prepared with his questions. I had no trouble understanding what I was expected to solve. The coding & design questions were challenging and appropriate for a candidate with my background.
Fourth round was about algorithmic problems.
I was able to solve them during the course of the interview with little to zero assistance. The interviewer seemed pleasant ( he seemed to be a french speaker like me ). These questions are more suited for candidates with 1-3 years of experience but I was happy to solve them.
Last round was about operations.
Interviewer was an operations engineer and we discussed a lot of high level design and how to run live production systems with no downtime. We talked about some distributed systems problems, rolling out code to production, monitoring etc.
Seeing the URL shortening service design question caught me off guard at first, but it turned out to be a lucky moment. Just a few days prior, I had practiced a similar architecture problem on PracHub, so I felt somewhat prepared to tackle scalability and data consistency aspects. The process included a recruiter screen, followed by a technical interview focused on system design. Overall, the questions were manageable, but I didn't end up receiving an offer, which was disappointing. The experience taught me a lot, though.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a URL shortening service (similar to bit.ly). What components would you include in your architecture, and how would you handle scalability and data consistency?
The Netflix interview loop is intense and lives up to its reputation. The recruiters are great, but the technical bar is absolute top tier. After a technical phone screen, the virtual onsite consisted of two deep system design rounds, a practical coding round, and very heavy behavioral rounds focused purely on their Culture Memo. They do not care about how many LeetCode hards you have memorized. They care about how you reason through scale, failure, and ambiguity.
Recruiter screen high level discussion.
Tech phone screen live programming exercise.
Virtual onsite, 3 tech rounds two culture/behavioral.
For mine it was like an out-of-body experience, except when I turned to look it wasn't a body at all; it was a plane. Watched it take off, seemed like maybe the pilot hit the throttle a little hard trying to reach cruising altitude and then.. dunno, maybe he dropped his cigarette under the seat or there was a bee in the cockpit or something because next thing you know he's flailing around while I watch the plane tumbling, helplessly aghast as a wing shears off from the stresses he's inducing. No survivors.
But seriously, good interview process. Very helpful recruiter team that will spend time detailing the process and expectations. Exercises are very realistic applied engineering stuff, not brain teasers or obscure algorithms or stuff you haven't done since college. Interview process may be different across the org so YMMV. I interviewed with the Content and Business Products side of the house (i.e., tools for studio, production, not streaming to end users) and the coding, sys design, and data modeling rounds all reflected that.
My advice to you: study the OSS software they publish, know your stuff and *stay calm*.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you had conflict with someone outside your group
