Applied directly. Initial contact with HR who gave me their really long slideshow about Netflix culture. Then there was a very light phone screen (which was mostly javascript trivia) with a hiring manager. Then I was invited on-site. They were a bit disorganized, and they told me that only two people were available to interview me and that I'd have to come back again if it went well.
First on-site interview was mostly system design questions, which was fine.
The second was a full implementation of an entire web front end component, complete with markup. This was a lot of pretty inconsequential code to write by hand with a marker, but I gave it a shot. There were a number of library functions that I couldn't remember off the top of my head, which seemed to annoy my interviewer. I usually try to "think out loud" for these kinds of interviews, but with something so rote, I didn't really have anything to say while I was just dumping HTML out onto the board.
My interviewer didn't really have any engagement in the process, eventually he just started playing on his phone. I guess he didn't like the way I had implemented the component, but he didn't really give much feedback.
After going through the obligatory, "questions for him" phase, he said bye and just walked in the opposite direction from the lobby, leaving me to just show myself out. It didn't seem very professional.
I was really expecting data structure and algorithm questions- the kind that are conducive to whiteboard coding. Instead, the seemed more interested in javascript gotchas and library trivia. I don't really see how that's helpful in an interview, but what do I know?
As a general comment, the Cultural slideshow gave me a few concerns about working there at Netflix, but no one at any stage of the whole process was willing to give answers to culture-related questions beyond just regurgitating what was in the long slide deck.