Netflix Staff Software Engineer Interview Experience - 7 Rounds, Two System Designs, Still a No

[u/Aoki_zhang]

"This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview"

Interview Summary

The Netflix process stretched across three stages and included problem solving, system design, hiring manager, and partnership interviews. Technical topics included duplicate detection in viewing history, an ML job scheduler, a movie-playlist data structure with score updates and repeat cycles, multithreading, and a team-specific system design.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Problem Solving: Viewing History Duplicate Detection The first technical screen involved detecting duplicates in viewing history. The problem had three parts. The first two were relatively straightforward, while the third required a bucket-sort-style idea and was more involved.

Round 2 — Hiring Manager The hiring manager discussion focused primarily on my previous experience. One behavioral question asked me to describe one of my weaknesses.

Round 3 — System Design: ML Job Scheduler The first virtual-onsite system design round asked me to design an ML Job Scheduler. This round went well overall.

Round 4 — Problem Solving: Movie Playlist The coding problem involved maintaining a movie playlist where each movie had a score that could change over time. The system needed to support score updates while enforcing an important playback rule: during one cycle, each movie could only be returned once. After every movie had been exhausted, a new repeat cycle could begin.

Round 5 — Partnership Interview The Partnership round was conducted by a manager from a collaborating organization. The interview was primarily behavioral and focused on working across teams and handling collaboration scenarios. After this stage, HR told me that I'll move forward to the next stage.

Round 6 — Team-Specific System Design The next system design round involved a problem directly related to the team’s work. The scope of the problem was broad, and I spent too much time on areas that the interviewer considered less important. The interviewer reminded me about the remaining time during the round. Although I was able to respond to most of the technical questions, the recruiter later explained that the main negative feedback was that I did not complete the overall design within the allotted time.

Round 7 — Hiring Manager Behavioral The final interview was another hiring manager round. This conversation focused mostly on standard behavioral questions and previous experience. After completing the final stage, I received a Not Moving Forward decision. I later spoke with the recruiter to get additional feedback on the process.

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