Netflix Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen on a Key-Value Store with TTL, Rejected

I recently interviewed for an IC5 role on the Netflix Ads team.

The phone screen was the classic Key-Value Store with TTL.

Personally I felt it went okay. I implemented the usual set of methods, and for TTL expiration I used a min heap keyed on timestamp. I explained my design thinking and the tradeoffs as I went, wrote test cases at the end, and the code ran correctly.

I still got rejected. The feedback was roughly: requirement clarification and problem breakdown were done well, but the code implementation was not concise and direct enough, and the way I expressed my thinking while solving was not coherent or clear enough.

Honestly I was a bit confused. I thought the min heap implementation was already pretty straightforward, and I kept explaining my design thinking and tradeoffs the whole time. I am not sure where exactly I fell short of expectations.

It feels like Netflix's interview bar really is high right now.