Hey folks, I recently went through the Netflix interview process for an L4 position, which was conducted remotely. I wanted to share my experience here.

My interview journey at Netflix consisted of several rounds:

Round 1: Recruiter Call (30 min)
This was a standard introductory call with the recruiter.

Round 1: Technical Phone Screen (60 min)
For this round, I was given a rate limit question. It focused on allowing a specific number of requests, say X, within Y seconds from a single client. The problem was quite similar in concept to LeetCode's 'Cache With Time Limit' problem.

Round 2: Problem Solving (60 min)
This round presented a unique scenario: 'You have 20 Linux servers and a 1Mbit/s connection (aggregate) to the mainland. How would you upgrade the OS while they're at sea? Bandwidth is expensive and unreliable.' It was a challenging problem requiring creative solutions under significant constraints.

Round 2: Coding (60 min)
Surprisingly, the coding question in this round was the exact same as the one from the Technical Phone Screen – another iteration of the rate limit problem.

Round 2: System Design (60 min)
This was a deep dive into designing a service discovery system. The prompt asked to 'Design a system to allow services to discover each other.' It further specified that a Service is composed of Tasks running on Nodes, with multiple Tasks from the same Service potentially on the same Node. Key requirements included ensuring traffic to new tasks when ready, redirecting traffic from stopping tasks, and avoiding sending traffic to overwhelmed tasks. The problem also provided clear assumptions about the existing compute system and scale figures (100k tasks, 10k nodes, 1k services).

Round 2: Hiring Manager (45 min)
The final round was a conversation with the hiring manager.

Ultimately, I was rejected for the L4 role. I'm still processing the feedback and reflecting on the challenging system design and problem-solving questions.