Netflix Interview Questions — Page 19

Netflix·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix SWE coding round with a dedup problem that kept growing. Three follow-ups I did not see coming, a mid-interview bug, and barely enough time to finish. Not my cleanest performance.

Given a Netflix homepage where each row contains several movies, remove duplicate movies from the rows. Once a row already has 6 movies, duplicates in that row are allowed.
Follow-up: make the dedup threshold per row dynamic instead of a fixed value of 6.
Follow-up: only deduplicate the first N rows; rows beyond that can contain duplicates freely.
Follow-up: certain special rows should be excluded from deduplication entirely, regardless of their position.

“The base problem felt manageable, track seen movies with a set and skip duplicates until each row hits 6.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Netflix system design round for a software engineering role. The whole session was basically one giant question about ad configuration infrastructure, which sounds narrow but actually sprawled into a lot of different territory fast.

Design a supply-side advertising configuration system that manages publisher-specific rules, covering inventory modeling, rule inheritance, conflict resolution, real-time evaluation, and safe deployment.

“This one is deceptively wide.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Netflix system design round, one big question about file backup systems that ended up going in a lot of directions. Felt okay in the moment but realized afterward I probably under-baked the failure handling section.

Design a scalable file backup system that replicates a source directory tree to a destination storage location, preserving structure and handling changes, deletions, large files, and failures gracefully.

“Spent the first few minutes just walking through file discovery with a recursive directory traversal, which felt solid.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix SWE interview with a graph scheduling problem that looked like a simple topological sort until it wasn't. The cycle detection piece caught me a bit off guard and the follow-up on returning per-task finish times added more bookkeeping than I expected.

Given n tasks with durations and prerequisite dependencies, compute the earliest finish time for each task and the minimum total time to complete all tasks. If the dependency graph has a cycle, return an error.

“I went straight to topological sort, which was the right instinct, but I fumbled the part where multiple prerequisites feed into one task.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

Behavioral loop at Netflix for a software engineer role. Lots of questions about past projects and how you work with others, plus they asked about the Netflix culture memo which I wasn't fully prepared to tie back to my own experience.

Can you give a brief introduction about yourself?
Have you read the Netflix culture memo? What are your thoughts on it, and how does it reflect the way you work?
Tell me about a project you built from the ground up. What was your role and how did it evolve?
How have you worked alongside non-technical stakeholders like product managers?
Why are you looking to make a move right now?
Walk me through your career history so far.
In the project you mentioned, how did you approach leading the technical direction for the team?
What draws you to Reddit specifically?

“Standard opener but I always fumble the pacing on this one.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Netflix system design round focused entirely on a data modeling problem for their ad platform. Pretty niche topic if you haven't worked in adtech before, and the scope was way broader than I expected for a single session.

Design a data model for tracking a direct-sold demand order in a demand-side advertising platform, covering advertisers, agencies, line items, targeting, creatives, delivery tracking, frequency caps, and auditability.

“This thing had like ten sub-domains crammed into one question.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix frontend design interview, basically a deep dive into building a video playlist component in React. The question had a lot of layers and the follow-ups kept coming, so it felt more like a system design round than a pure coding screen.

Design and implement a React video playlist component that displays video thumbnails, plays only one video at a time when a thumbnail is clicked, and supports a 'Play All' mode that sequences through all videos automatically.
How would you optimize this playlist for performance when there are a large number of videos, for example through virtualization, lazy loading, or controlling when player elements are mounted?
How would you structure state management for this component to keep it clear and scalable as requirements grow?
How would you break this into a component hierarchy and define the props and interfaces for something like a Playlist container, individual VideoItem, and a Controls component?
What accessibility and browser autoplay policy considerations would you factor into this component?

“I started talking about useState for tracking the active video index and useRef for grabbing player elements, which felt right.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix SWE interview, got a versioned key-value store design question. Pretty classic but there are enough edge cases to trip you up if you're not careful.

Design and implement an in-memory versioned key-value store that supports put(key, value, timestamp) and get(key, timestamp), where get returns the value at the largest timestamp less than or equal to the query timestamp, or null if none exists. Same-timestamp overwrites should take the latest write. Discuss time and space complexity.

“I started with a plain hashmap mapping keys to a list of (timestamp, value) pairs, which felt obvious.”

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Netflix·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix SWE coding round, one tree problem the whole time. Pretty focused session, they wanted a clean O(n) solution and weren't interested in anything slower.

Given an undirected tree with n nodes rooted at node 1, where each node has an integer value, compute the subtree sum for every node in O(n) time using DFS.

“My first instinct was to just do repeated DFS calls per node which is obviously O(n^2) and I caught myself before saying it out loud, barely.”

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Netflix·Data Scientist·Hiring Manager Screen

Jul 2026

Netflix hiring manager round for a Data Scientist role, focused almost entirely on a deep project walkthrough and how you handle criticism. Pretty intense for what I expected to be a casual conversation.

Walk me through a project where you owned the technical direction end to end. What trade-offs did you have to make, and how did you define whether it succeeded?
Tell me about a time you got negative feedback you weren't expecting. What was your reaction, and what actually changed because of it?

“This is the kind of question that sounds easy until you're actually in it and realize your 'impactful project' story has no real metrics attached.”

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