Senior Engineer’s Guide to Netflix Interviews + Questions

A Senior Engineer’s Guide to Netflix's Interview Process and Questions

The Netflix Hiring Process and Common Questions

Netflix’s interview process consists of the following steps:

Before we get into the details of each of these steps, here are a few general notes about Netflix’s process, evaluation criteria, and interviewers.

Every human organization views themselves as a metaphor; Netflix doesn’t view themselves as a family like some other tech companies, they view themselves as a high-caliber sports team (in fact, Netflix calls their employees a “dream team”). They explain this metaphor themselves in their infamous culture memo.

Finally, Netflix’s interview process is decentralized and team-dependent. Moreover, you can interview with multiple teams at Netflix concurrently, which can help you increase your odds of securing a job offer.

Step 1: Recruiter call

Step 2: Hiring manager screen

This is a 30 minute call. A former Netflix employee called this round “Very chill, especially compared to the onsite.” This round consists of bidirectional surface-level questions.

The hiring manager will also be selling you on Netflix. Hiring managers doing selling is business as usual, but in this case, it serves an additional purpose – because their onsite is by far the most intense, they have to sell harder upfront because the onsite is a bigger commitment for the candidates.

Step 3: Technical phone screen

The Netflix technical phone screen is a coding interview that typically lasts 45-60 minutes. There is significant inter-team variation on what these interviews cover, and the tooling you use during these interviews also varies by team.

Step 4: Onsite

Onsite interview structure varies from team to team, but you’ll have roughly 8 interviews focused primarily on system design, then behavioral, and then coding.

Depending on the length of the onsite, Netflix recruiting may ask you if you’d prefer to split the onsite over two days, and we recommend that you proactively ask to do that, given how taxing the behavioral and system design portions are!

Netflix is the only FAANG that routinely includes 1-2 directors in their onsite loops. If your loop has two, it’ll be one director from your org and another from a partner org. Netflix does this to reduce bias. One director may do a system design interview, and the other will do a behavioral interview.

Tip to get unstuck

“Don’t be thrown off by having to talk to directors. Just stick to the principles: when you speak about technical stuff you’ve worked on, focus on scale, availability, and security. When you speak about behavioral stuff: use shared ideas from their culture deck, take accountability for your wins and failures, and demonstrate metrics and impact.”

Netflix’s interview types in detail

Coding

The technical questions Netflix asks vary from team to team. Some teams don’t ask LeetCode questions. Other teams will ask medium-difficulty LeetCode-style coding questions with a creative/practical twist.

These rounds are going to change team by team, but the pattern we’ve noticed is that Netflix coding questions often come in two parts.

Typically there is one question and, in scenarios where edge cases and tests are done early, say within 45 minutes, the interviewer may choose to spend some time discussing general large scale engineering concepts and distributed systems (like microservices, scalability, etc.).

System design

This is the most important round at Netflix. Coding carries the least weight, behavioral carries a lot, and system design has the most.

Netflix system design rounds are highly unique and highly challenging. Netflix is to system design as Google is to coding; these technical interview rounds include the most difficult and bespoke questions.

Tip to get unstuck

Learn about Netflix’s overall architecture so you can a) speak their language, and b) build or speak of something similar (in the interview) that Netflix has already built but simpler.

Behavioral

Answers to behavioral questions are almost as important as system design at Netflix. You’ll get rejected if you fail the behavioral screen.

Netflix will ask about impressive things you’ve done, as well as dig into your motivation (your “why”). This round will feel like you’re doing self-promotion. Typical questions will ask about your favorite project, latest project, and most significant project, as well as open-ended questions about what you’re looking for in your next role and why you’re interested in Netflix.

Tip to get unstuck

Promote yourself early and often in Netflix behavioral rounds. Promote yourself proactively. Metrics and impact statements are effective ways to promote yourself because they convey a sense of scale and complexity.

How Netflix makes hiring decisions

Netflix interviewers are untrained, their questions are unstandardized, their interviews are team-dependent, and their decision-making north star is “Why”. You can interview with multiple teams concurrently, effectively giving you multiple shots on goal.

Tip to get unstuck

Impression management is more powerful at companies that do live feedback discussions. To learn more about impression management, check out the resources to prepare for Netflix later in this section.

Netflix coding interview preparation resources

We’ve aggregated a bunch of useful Netflix content for you! We have replays of candidates doing mock interviews with Netflix interviewers, long-form solutions to common Netflix questions, and deep dives into technical topics that tend to come up in Netflix interviews.

Technical topics

To figure out what technical topics will come up in your Netflix interviews, we did two things. First, we spoke to a bunch of Netflix interviewers in our community. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with Glassdoor data AND our own data-set of mock interviews in the style of Netflix. Based on all of the above, here are the technical topics you’re likely to encounter: