Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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24 stories

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NetflixSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NetflixMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

ML Fundamentals Plus a Production PR Review, Rejected

Sharing a failure story from September. The recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and then we scheduled a phone screen. Since this was hiring for a newly formed applied GenAI org, the format was pretty new and I haven't seen it in any other interview write-ups: 30 min of ML fundamentals + 30 min of practical coding. 30 min ML fundamentals, three questions: What is a KV cache? What is attention…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Data Platform Loop, Rejected After the Final System Design Round

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…

RejectedOnsite0
NetflixMachine Learning EngineerIntern
Sep 2026

90-Minute OA With 4 MC and 2 Coding Questions

I just finished the Netflix MLE Intern OA. It was timed at 90 minutes, with 6 questions total: 4 multiple choice and 2 coding. Below are the topics I remember. I don't fully remember the exact wording or details anymore, but I hope this helps others preparing for the same OA. The multiple choice questions were fairly basic overall. The topics I can recall: Bayes' formula; simple calculations invo…

Online Assessment0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Back-to-Back Coding Rounds and a No-Feedback Rejection

The questions were different from every interview report I had seen. There were two back-to-back interviews. First phone round — problem solving: Question: The ping times between cities are different. Starting from one city, find the fastest paths for broadcasting to every other city. Solution: Dijkstra's algorithm. Follow-up: If the ping times keep changing, how should the paths be updated? Solu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

An Open-Book Coding Screen That Still Ended in Rejection

I interviewed for the Member team — it was basically an open-book style interview, similar to a couple of other phone screen reports I'd seen. Problem Solving: Netflix homepage content dedup — for each row, the first n titles need to be deduplicated globally; after position n+1, you only need to make sure there's no duplicate within that row itself. Follow-ups: 1. what if n is different for each…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Netflix Software Engineer interview: seven interviews over more than two months

My Netflix Software Engineer process took a little more than two months from applying to accepting an offer. What surprised me was the number of steps. I went through seven interviews, a mix of technical rounds and behavioral conversations, so it felt like a long, involved process rather than a quick loop. The technical side covered coding and systems design style thinking. The difficulty felt hi…

OfferTechnical Screen0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Passed VO1 With a Billboard Rotation Coding Round and an ML Job Scheduler System Design

Netflix's VO (virtual onsite) has two rounds — VO1 and VO2. VO1 is more general. VO2 leans into stuff related to the specific team you're interviewing with. I'll share VO1 here. Coding: movie billboard rotation. Don't use a heap — use two treemaps. Two followups total: 1) multi-threading, 2) how you'd scale it in production and how you'd store/access the data. SD: schedule ML jobs. The main point…

In progressOnsite0
NetflixData ScientistSenior+
Jun 2026

Technical Screen, Not Sure Where I Went Wrong

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Rejected After a Technical Screen with an Unexpectedly High Bar

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Reported Apr 2026

First-Ever System Design Round, a Subscription System, and an Offer

This was my very first system design interview, and I had no real background in it at all. I had about a week to prepare. I began with an online system design course and read all of its articles. They explained what system design even is and gave me an outline I could stick to. After that I moved on to the course's practice problems, and those are what really changed things for me. I watched some…

OfferOther0
NetflixSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Four Onsite Rounds on the Ads Team, Then Ghosted During a Freeze

Posting to share my interview experience with a different team on the Ads side, hoping it brings me some luck. It's been two weeks since I finished interviewing and I've been ghosted — no message at all from HR, so it's probably just gone into a black hole. First, I asked if I could interview for Staff, but HR firmly said no, telling me that an outside L6 is an L5 here, and that I'd have a chance…

No responseOnsite0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

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 ki…

Onsite0
NetflixData ScientistIntern
Mar 2026

A 75-Minute Causal Inference OA That Left Me Guessing

New here, and internships are so hard to find. This is the second OA I've gotten after countless mass applications, and long story short, it's been two weeks with no response so I'm assuming it's dead. The whole thing was about 75 minutes and had to be completed within a week. First there were two coding questions, and you could use Python or R — both coding questions were under the same setting.…

No responseOnline Assessment0
NetflixMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

VO2, a Culture BQ Round and a Fullstack ML Portal Design

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OnsiteXP0
NetflixSoftware EngineerSenior+
Jan 2026

Onsite Loop in the Ads Org: Topo Sort, System Design, and Two BQs

I passed this earlier this year, for the Ads department, which has been pretty popular lately. Since I'm planning to accept the offer, I'm not going to post the specific questions — search for the last three months of posts here and you'll find they're almost all the same type. I'll share some experience and feelings that I hope will be useful. Process-wise: they got back to me 1 day after the ph…

OfferOnsite0
NetflixSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Two Technical Rounds, Rejected for Not Being 'Clean' Enough

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP1
NetflixData ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

Causal Inference OA, Ghosted After Two Weeks

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No responseOnline AssessmentXP0
NetflixMachine Learning Engineer
Jan 2026

ML Infra Onsite With Coding, Stakeholder Chat, and Compute-Allocation Design

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OnsiteXP0
NetflixData Engineer
Dec 2025

Two Different Names, Two Onsite Rejections

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RejectedOnsiteXP0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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