I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Netflix in May 2015
Interview
Got contacted by the recruiter. Setup a time to talk, went through the ~ 100 something slideshow.
The recruiter said she was impressed with my skills, set up time to talk with the Hiring Manager. I spoke to the Hiring Manager who was nice to talk to, went over my background and skills in depth.
He was particularly interested in knowing about my AWS experience and how I designed a scalable Metrics collection service . Overall was a positive conversation purely on background and experience.
Next up, the Hiring Manager suggested a technical programming phone screen. And I setup some time for it. The phone-screen was awkward from the start. I google'd the interviewer's name before the interview and found out that he's the kind who runs blogs on interviewing questions and puzzles. While I particularly detest narrowing down Software Engineering to a bunch of puzzle type questions, I am well aware of what such kinds of interviewers are after.
I prepped hard and going through Cracking the Coding Interview and other resources. When I saw the interview problem, I just had the gut feel that I could crack this, I went through the edge-cases and design ideas meticulously and wrote the code given below.
3 days later, I get an email from the recruiter saying that "my background and skills do not match". I tried to follow up but did not get concrete feedback. This was very weird and I felt frustrated, since I had already spoken to the Hiring Manager - and he'd okay-ed a phone screen - either the recruiter was lying or I was being used as interview target practice for someone on the team.
For the record, I never head back from them on what skills they thought I was 'mismatched'. Overall I think it was a finicky process and a company.
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
