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

~20 minute read

Table of Contents

Part 1: Differences between the FAANGs

Part 2: A guide to each FAANG company’s interview process

Netflix’s interview process and questions

Netflix’s interview process consists of the following steps:

Step 1: Recruiter call

Please see the section above called “A note about recruiter calls”

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.

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.

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. Netflix is the only FAANG that routinely includes 1-2 directors in their onsite loops.

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.”

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. Netflix coding questions often come in two parts:

  1. A system design expansion on top of the coding question.
  2. A deep dive into a specific skill set.

System design

This is the most important round at Netflix. Netflix system design rounds include the most difficult and bespoke questions. They are likely to ask you about scaling, availability, and maintain secure systems.

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 emphasizes the candidate being a cultural fit, highly motivated individuals capable of driving products forward.

How Netflix makes hiring decisions

Netflix interviewers are untrained, their questions are unstandardized, and their decision-making north star is “Why”. There’s also no specific company-wide scale for performance.

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.

Netflix interview replays

Solutions to common Netflix questions

MEDIUM
Recover Binary Search Tree
Two elements of a binary search tree (BST) are swapped by mistake. Recover the tree without changing its structure.

HARD
Binary Array Partition
Given an array Z of 0s and 1s, divide the array into 3 non-empty parts, such that all of these parts represent the same binary value.

Other Netflix interview preparation resources

The resources listed below are designed to help with various aspects of Netflix interview prep, from technical problem-solving to understanding the company’s core values.

System design

Since Netflix has the most difficult system design screen, practice low-level system design questions more than high-level ones.

Behavioral

These resources will help you “learn their language.”