I think the team I interviewed for was data platform. A recruiter reached out because I had related experience a few years ago.
From other posts I used to think the problem solving round and the coding round were different, but after going through it they feel like essentially the same thing. Netflix's interview process is very long, and different teams probably test different things, so you need to prepare specifically for the team.
R1 Phone Screen
Problem solving: watch history duplicate detection. It had three parts. It is a known question from other interview reports, so you can check other posts. Only the third part uses bucket sort, which is a bit tricky. The other two parts are very easy.
HM: I don't remember it well. I think they just asked about my experience and so on, and at the end one BQ, asking what my weaknesses are.
R2 VO
System Design: I think it was a known question, I saw someone mention it before, an ML Job Scheduler. I did really well in this round.
Problem solving: a known question from other reports, the movie playlist, I remember someone sharing it. It has to support updating a score, and the main point is that each get can only return a movie once, and when all the movies are exhausted it starts the next repeat loop.
I did not prepare well for this one, but I still got it done in the end. I used two sorted lists to rotate. At first I tried to do it with a heap and got stuck for a long time, and in the end there was no time left to write tests or anything. The follow-up was multi-threading, and I just said out loud where I would put locks. The feedback I got was that this round had a miss, but the multi-threading part was fine.
Partnership: this is basically a manager from another partner team interviewing you, and it is mainly BQ. I answered this round so-so. Some questions I had not prepared for and had to come up with answers on the spot, so I stumbled through them and did not answer well.
After this round there was a holiday in between, and I followed up with HR afterwards, and they said I was moving on to the next round.
R3 VO
System Design: a design directly related to the team's own work. I thought it went okay, but the feedback came back and this round killed me. The reason was that I did not finish the design within the allotted time, even though I basically handled every question the interviewer asked, and after the interview I went through the proposal with AI and did not see any problem with it. The interviewer reminded me about the time at one point. Maybe I just did not manage my pacing well, because the problem itself was very wide and I spent a lot of time on parts the interviewer did not think were that important.
HM: met the HM again, and this round was basically regular BQ. This time I was pretty satisfied with my answers.
Overall, I feel you need to get really comfortable with the known interview questions. Netflix BQ cares a lot about their culture, so read it several times so you don't step on a landmine. And whether the round is called problem solving, XX expertise, or partnership, it is really still coding, SD and BQ, they are just named differently.
Yesterday I got the message that they are not moving forward, and I got on a call with the recruiter to ask for feedback. I made it all the way to the last round and still did not get the offer, which is pretty disappointing.
Hope this helps anyone who needs it.
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