Netflix Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 257 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Netflix.
Netflix
Software Engineer
Senior Average Positive experience No offer 6 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Onsite
Interview formats
Behavioral Technical Coding System Design Other
Recruiter screen with a high level discussion. Technical phone screen with a live programming exercise. Virtual onsite with 3 technical rounds and two culture/behavioral rounds. Very helpful recruiter team that will spend time walking through the process and expectations. Exercises are realistic applied engineering work, not brain teasers, obscure algorithms, or stuff you haven't touched since college. Process can vary across the org so YMMV. I interviewed with the Content and Business Products side (tools for studio and production, not end-user streaming) and the coding, system design, and data modeling rounds all reflected that. My advice: study their published OSS software, know your stuff, and stay calm.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with someone who wasn’t in your own group.
Netflix
software engineer
Senior Negative experience 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Onsite
Interview formats
Behavioral Other
I just had the weirdest interview. I had a hiring manager interview that was technically the first one after the recruiter screen. The hiring manager asked me 2 questions: 1. Could you introduce yourself 2. Tell me about something you've worked on recently. Not even 10 minutes into the interview, after I answered those, they said they like to run interviews like 1:1s and told me to ask them questions lol. So I ended up just asking them questions for about 50 minutes. It felt like they were really unprepared. It kinda seemed like they didn’t like my answers to the first two questions and were just trying to kill time. This was for a senior swe role on the live team at Netflix. I’ve done a bunch of HM interviews and never had one like this. Definitely the most odd interview I’ve ever had.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you give a quick intro about yourself?
- Can you talk about a project or something you’ve worked on recently?
Netflix
software engineer
Mid Average Neutral experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Phone screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Technical Coding
Recently had a phone screen where the recruiter said it would be leetcode but it turned out to be OOD instead. It was a pretty straightforward prompt like create a class with some functionalities. The key point was you have to clarify everything since the question is just a one liner, then talk about why you implemented it that way. I was thrown off by the OOP question at first and switched from python to Java, but then halfway through I just started using python syntax cause it's faster. I still solved the problem and answered all follow ups but I’m sure I could’ve done better if I just stuck with python. It also took a long time for them to get back to me with the results so my guess was that I was a weak hire and they found someone better.
Confirmed questions1 question
- design a class and add some basic functionalities to it
Netflix Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Netflix interview reports.
“Build a versioned key‑value store that supports operations like put with a timestamp/version and get by key, optionally by a specific version or the latest one.”
Read reports →“Given a hash table of objects, iterating is usually constant time, except in cases where it suddenly takes much longer. In what situation would that happen?”
Read reports →“What, exactly, does the load average in `top` mean, and how does it behave if all the threads in a pool are blocked?”
Read reports →“Given a set of tasks with dependencies between them, schedule the tasks so that if two tasks are not dependent on each other, you arrange them to run in parallel.”
Read reports →“How would you efficiently transfer a 1GB file over the network, not talking about TCP or UDP?”
Read report →“Implement a basic cache (the exact interface wasn’t fully detailed by the poster, but clearly includes things like put/set and get, plus some eviction behavior).”
Read report →“How do you compute the union and intersection of 2 lists (assume they have millions of values)? How would you optimize your approach?”
Read report →“Walk me through what happens behind the scenes from the moment you type http://www.netflix.com into your browser until the data is displayed on the screen.”
Read report →“Design a movie recommendation algorithm based on a social graph. Inputs given are the social graph, what movies different people have seen, their rating for each movie, and the overall rating of each movie. Then there were follow-up questions on how the weights among friends' movies would be chosen.”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 257 Netflix interview reports.