The process was lengthy - too many phases. Questions were easy. Slow recruiters were the biggest issue. The process consisted of: - Phone call with the recruiter - Phone call with the hiring manager - 2 phone calls / technical screens with the engineers - On-site day of interviews (5 sessions) - in my case it was Los Angeles - Second on-site day of interviews - in my case it would be Los Gatos I applied out of curiosity to a Full Stack SDE position in their Marketing department, while being a Principal SDE at a public company. It took about 5 days of their recruiter to contact me for a first chat. Then we had a phone call with their engineering manager. She described the team, checked my soft skills, asked for thoughts about their 5-pages culture article. It took the recruiter 8 days to update me about the results :( Then we had a technical screening phone call consisting of 2 sessions 30-45 minutes long each. In each of those sessions 2 engineers asked me to do coding tasks in Coderpad. The tasks were primitive - refactor some code, write a couple of tests, give example of an XSS, etc. After that I was invited to Netflix office in Hollywood for a day of interviews. The area looked quite bad for living/working/commuting. Got both positive and negative impression from the on-site interviews. I liked meeting the hiring manager and two engineers, while didn't like meetings with the project manager and the second recruiter (they seemed to be "robots"). Also - lol - my host just abandoned me. First session - technical interview. Their SDE gave me a task to whiteboard (see below). He answered a couple of questions. Then he ran away fast after the interview, but overall he was live and invested into the process. Second session - talk with the engineering manager again. Questions about my ideas how to deal with people, situations, etc. Gave me a technical task to whiteboard (see below). Asked her my questions - the answers aligned with my views. The only questionable thing is that the manager seemed to be an unneeded layer - as all my questions on how she helped developers resulted in "developers are very independent and should solve everything themself". So her role was just about hiring new people and signing salary checks. But the discussion was overall useful, and she was an interesting person. Third session - technical interview. An SDE gave me a coding task to whiteboard (see below). Then we had a long forced chat on different topics regarding the life at Netflix. Basically, my host lady met me in the morning and said she would come after the third session to show the office and get some snacks. The SDE was hopelessly trying to locate her via Slack, and when it failed we had to talk with him until the next interview. I got insights about the life there. Some stories were questionable - e.g. how the first SDE I met that day spent a week on changing a properly working build process to use a different tool, because he personally liked it more (the story was provided to glorify the productivity of Netflix folks, but looked like a waste of time / money). The forth interview seemed like a chat with "robot" - a mechanical walk-through the list of soft-skills questions. The meeting with a second recruiter finished the day. Again a "robot-like" style of questions about soft skills and experience. Well, the person was alive - but seemed to have a professional deformation because of working as a recruiter for like ten years already. He was asking the list of questions he had to ask, smiling to play his role, laughing when he needed to laugh. Was not interested much in the process. Happened to be the most flawed link in the chain of interviewers. Promised to give me the results in like 3 days - never happened. 7 days later that recruiter emailed me to find some time to talk. All those attempts failed. First, he didn't read email with my response until next afternoon (one should believe, that Netflix recruiters do not read emails in the morning). Then he failed to call me on the day when he scheduled the call. And didn't even follow-up the next day. I had to contact the hiring manager and the other recruiter. Only after that - 10 days after the on-site interviews - got an email that I didn't pass due to over-complicating solutions to the tech tasks, also due to some concerns regarding my culture answers. My conclusion regarding the tech results: kids, do not show your knowledge to Netflix, rather solve the tasks in the easiest manner :) Regarding the culture questions - it's up to Netflix to decide what answers they like. To summarize: - Liked - strong language of their culture doc, tasks and scale, meeting the team members (not just some unrelated engineers) - Didn't like - working with the second recruiter (uhhh...), chat with the project manager, the LA area of the office (traffic, congestion, appearance).

Seeing the URL shortening service design question caught me off guard at first, but it turned out to be a lucky moment. Just a few days prior, I had practiced a similar architecture problem on PracHub, so I felt somewhat prepared to tackle scalability and data consistency aspects. The process included a recruiter screen, followed by a technical interview focused on system design. Overall, the questions were manageable, but I didn't end up receiving an offer, which was disappointing. The experience taught me a lot, though.