Netflix Interview Questions

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We've helped several engineers get the job at Netflix

Interview Cake is a strategy for engineers to ace programming interviews from companies like Netflix. Lots of people go into Netflix's software engineer interviews with just some practice from the standard code interview questions, but that's not actually enough. We help you ace the technical interview by giving you a framework to approach any technical interview, no matter how difficult.

Netflix's engineering team has a culture of openness. They are prolific with contributions to open source, and that helps them draw in top talent. However, their engineering screening process is tough. Their team is responsible for delivering media-rich content to all types of devices to delight their users, and they want engineers who can help them improve with their mission.

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Practice Questions for the Netflix Interview

Netflix's coding interviews are hard, but not impossible. Like anything else, it just takes practice. We'll walk you through it, step by step.

The Nth Fibonacci Number »

This one's a classic, but there's more than meets the eye. Our first thought might be a naive recursive solution, but it has a massive time cost... keep reading »

MillionGazillion™: A New Search Engine »

I wrote a web crawler that's running on my old desktop computer in my parents' basement (where I totally don't live anymore), and it keeps running out of memory... keep reading »

Implement a Queue With Two Stacks »

This one's a classic toy problem that will really help you understand the importance of the different properties of queues and stacks. There's a naive solution, but then there's a much more efficient... keep reading »

Check the Fairness of our Cafe Kitchen »

My cake shop is so popular, I'm adding some tables and hiring wait staff so folks can have a cute sit-down cake-eating experience. Recently, some customers have been complaining that people who placed orders after them are getting their food... keep reading »

Find The Rotation Point In An Array »

I have an array of words that are mostly alphabetical, except they start somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, reach the end, and then start from the beginning of the alphabet. In other words, this is an alphabetically ordered array that has been "rotated"... keep reading »

Product of Other Numbers »

You have an array of integers, and for each index you want to find the product of every integer except the integer at that index. Write a function that takes an array... keep reading »

Does This Linked List Have A Cycle? »

Write a function contains_cycle() that takes the first node in a singly-linked list and returns a boolean indicating whether the list contains a cycle. Careful—a cycle can occur in the middle of a list, or it can simply... keep reading »

Girl Scout Cookie Conspiracy »

A friend and I are trying to win the prize for most Girl Scout Cookies sold. Write a function to merge our sorted arrays of orders into one sorted array of orders. Think about edge cases! What happens when we've finished merging one... keep reading »

Binary Search Tree Checker »

Write a function to check that a binary tree is a valid binary search tree. Careful: checking a node against its parent isn't sufficient to prove... keep reading »

Permutation Palindrome »

Write an efficient function that checks whether any permutation of an input string is a palindrome. We can do this in time and... keep reading »

What people are saying about Netflix's interview

Here are some positive snippets from interview reviews from Glassdoor:

  • "Two interviews, one with a recruiter and final one with a supervisor. They are more attentive to your personalty and problem solving skills than anything. They really love someone who has a personality full of energy and willing to always improve. Positive positioning customers is number one for them. Just be yourself."
  • "One of the best interviews in bay area. It is very diverse company even you start seeing the company becoming like Indian shop. The culture and values are great. You interview with smart people not just engineers but product managers not other cross-functional."
  • "Overall it's very good, interviewers are very nice and knowledgeable. All three senior developers have different focus: one general about your background and depth of interested areas; one review the take home test; another mainly for a coding test. And hiring manager mainly asked some concepts/knowledge and some design issues. HR person focused on personality, culture, etc."
And here are some negative snippets from interview reviews from Glassdoor:
  • "After the final interview there was silence, a long silence. After several emails and calls still silence. Finally I had to learn via the recruitment agency that the silence meant they would not move further with the position. Up to today still no feedback from the Netflix team about why they did not want to move on, the position is still open. To my view you should always tell candidates about the decision positive or negative, either via a short email, or even better in a short phone call."
  • "Spoke to recruiter after applying on their website, he gave me a cringeworthy corporate spiel about “netflix values” and asked me to read 125 page slide deck about it . Dev manager sent me an coding exercise and asked me to share it via github. Which I did. He called me next week and said he is rejecting me because...I used java 7 instead of java 8 which shows them that I don’t keep up with new tech. When I responded that I actually use java 8 at work and all my open source code is written in java 8 for him to look and his exercise didn’t explicitly mention which version of java to use, he accused me of not taking feedback gracefully which is against netflix values."
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