I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Jan 2016
Interview
Summary: Netflix seems to be an awesome place to work at. Everyone I talked to seemed like a top performer and also seem to make every effort to keep their culture in line with what they have published publically. I am one of those guys who calls BS when he reads culture decks because in my experience once a company grows beyond certain point, every team defines its own culture but Netflix seemed like an exception and I wish every company could embress or at least imbibe what they have culturally.
Even though I don't anticipate an offer my recommendation is to focus more on questions that you generally expect from HR and managers. Those are the tough ones and as engineer I think many of us do poorly in this area. Things that we should definitely know but are hard to express. For example the questions like Why Netflix? What do you want from your ideal job? What is the best environment for you to be successful? I am sure in your head you know what it is but make an effort to verbalize it. They are trying to judge if you will fit with a unique culture that they have worked so hard to develop and preserve and your technical ability is important but still not as important(or at least as important) as their culture.
* A call with recruiter to align my interests with position
* A call with director to I guess vet the basic culture fit
* A call with manager , again for both basic culture fit and technical assessment
* A technical phone screen.
* Onsite:
Recruiter: Culture fit and making sure I understand how they are different from most companies.
Dev manager: Explained what the team does in more details , described what is expected of the person who would join the team, the challenges and the road map that he has for the team. Overall he did everything in his power to give me as much information possible as he can to make the right decision if they extended an offer.
Sr. Engineer: Describe one of the challenging problems you have solved and discussed the design decisions I made. Pretty awesome guy and he was smart so it was very stimulating discussion, for a second I forgot I am interviewing. He asked a coding question which was something that lot of us have to use in real life not one of those trick questions.
Dev manager/engineer from a sister team: Again awesome guy. Asked a system design question. Again we had a discussion that you expect to have when designing a solution with your teammates. He brought up some good points and I change my design accordingly. The biggest mistake I made was mathematical (confused gb with mb iirc) but he did not really point that out and let me focus on the crux of the problem.
At this point I was given a lunch break and I was told in the beginning that I will have 3 more rounds depending on how the first 4 round goes. I am not sure what it means if you get to next round, it can either mean there was not enough evidence to reject you or it can mean there is enough evidence to keep going but we can all just guess. Anyhow, if you don't go beyond this point , please understand that you have been rejected. I was given the opportunity to move forward.
Director: This was the second hardest interview for me. She talked about projects where i had slipped the delivery dates and what i have done to rectify those situation. I think I failed to verbalize things correctly but overall she tried to extract as much info as she could to figure out my personality and working style.
Sr. Director: Talked about a challenging design problem and how netflix was a pretty awesome place to work at. Also enquired about the reason for leaving , how netflix will be different or not for those reasons. Again I believe this was culture fit assessment.
VP: This was my worst interview of the day. May be because I was tired, may be because the VP just somehow felt intimidating, I am not sure. He asked me to tell him what feedbacks my colleagues might give about me. It was more of a wake up call for me that I really did not have much to say in this regard until ofcourse the interview was over. He also discussed one of the projects on my resume and how I would have changed things.
Overall I was very happy with the interview process. I hate interviews where you don't endup learning anything and unless you get an offer it becomes one wasted day. This was different. Given my poor responses in the final 3 rounds I don't anticipate an offer but I hope others learn from my mistakes. The key is to think hard about these culture questions that you probably think you know the answers to but don't know how to communicate to others. Good luck.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What feedback would your peers give you if you ask them for some criticism?
How do you handle brilliant jerks?
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.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a URL shortening service (similar to bit.ly). What components would you include in your architecture, and how would you handle scalability and data consistency?
The Netflix interview loop is intense and lives up to its reputation. The recruiters are great, but the technical bar is absolute top tier. After a technical phone screen, the virtual onsite consisted of two deep system design rounds, a practical coding round, and very heavy behavioral rounds focused purely on their Culture Memo. They do not care about how many LeetCode hards you have memorized. They care about how you reason through scale, failure, and ambiguity.
Recruiter screen high level discussion.
Tech phone screen live programming exercise.
Virtual onsite, 3 tech rounds two culture/behavioral.
For mine it was like an out-of-body experience, except when I turned to look it wasn't a body at all; it was a plane. Watched it take off, seemed like maybe the pilot hit the throttle a little hard trying to reach cruising altitude and then.. dunno, maybe he dropped his cigarette under the seat or there was a bee in the cockpit or something because next thing you know he's flailing around while I watch the plane tumbling, helplessly aghast as a wing shears off from the stresses he's inducing. No survivors.
But seriously, good interview process. Very helpful recruiter team that will spend time detailing the process and expectations. Exercises are very realistic applied engineering stuff, not brain teasers or obscure algorithms or stuff you haven't done since college. Interview process may be different across the org so YMMV. I interviewed with the Content and Business Products side of the house (i.e., tools for studio, production, not streaming to end users) and the coding, sys design, and data modeling rounds all reflected that.
My advice to you: study the OSS software they publish, know your stuff and *stay calm*.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you had conflict with someone outside your group