Netflix Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two BQ Rounds Left Me With No Signal

Just finished my interview.

L5 SDE, Ads team, onsite.

Coding: Not a LeetCode problem, but it's basically a Tree DFS problem underneath. Not too hard, but remember to write your own code and actually test it yourself.

SD: Ad frequency cap — a classic.

DM: Demand-side table. Also a classic — the usual set of tables: advertiser / campaign / ad group / ad.

BQ1: Honestly I couldn't really tell what kind of "product thinking" they were going for here. I think this round and the next one were both BQ rounds, just with a different focus.

BQ2: I've been asked so many BQ questions at this point I'm numb to it. The classic ask-for-feedback / give-feedback type of question.

After the interview, my feeling was that the technical rounds weren't much — it's basically a half-open-book exam at this point.

But the BQ round... I've seen people say this round doesn't reject people, and I really don't think that's true.

It's very intensive, and the key difference from the technical rounds is that there is no correct answer.

You finish talking and the interviewer just moves on, but you genuinely have no idea whether they are going to pass you or not.

I have zero confidence going into the result. I would really recommend everyone take the BQ round seriously — I think this company is pretty BQ-heavy overall.