The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Netflix (Los Gatos, CA) in Apr 2016
Interview
I had a recruiter phone-screen, a manager phone- screen, followed by an onsite.
The onsite had a recruiter in-person, 3 tech rounds and a round with the manager.
My interviews went well and I still cannot fathom why I was not offered a job.
I did well on all the technical interviews especially with their senior-most engineer.
I honestly feel that the manager did not have a clear hiring bar.
I suspect there was some negativity from him.
He should have had sufficient data about how proficient I was, given that we interacted on-phone and on-site.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
My first onsite was with the recruiter. The recruiter was very pleasant and we talked about why I was interested in Netflix and other companies that I was exploring for a job. He wanted to know why I was leaving my current company. I was quite upfront with the recruiter. He seemed to appreciate the directness.
Second round was with the manager.
It wasn't a coding session, but more of a design/data structures problem specifically for the Netflix CDN scale. This seemed a bit excessive since I had already interacted with the manager twice and had done his take-home test.
Not much discussion about what my role in the team could be.
Lot of vague technical questions were asked.
Third round was with the senior-most engineer on the team. It was the best interview experience I had that day. Areas covered: Locks, concurrency, system design..
We had a great conversation about implementing low-level locks and designing a Netflix service that prevents users from sharing accounts. The interviewer was articulate and well prepared with his questions. I had no trouble understanding what I was expected to solve. The coding & design questions were challenging and appropriate for a candidate with my background.
Fourth round was about algorithmic problems.
I was able to solve them during the course of the interview with little to zero assistance. The interviewer seemed pleasant ( he seemed to be a french speaker like me ). These questions are more suited for candidates with 1-3 years of experience but I was happy to solve them.
Last round was about operations.
Interviewer was an operations engineer and we discussed a lot of high level design and how to run live production systems with no downtime. We talked about some distributed systems problems, rolling out code to production, monitoring etc.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Netflix (San Jose, CA) in May 2015
Interview
Only talked to manager after a few email back and forth. Second part was over the phone, no tech questions just basic things about the company, what they were looking for and what they do at the company, challenges they have etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
No tech questions, just basic HR type things, where do you feel you would fit in best etc
Recruiter found me through LinkedIn. We had a chat for 30 mins, then talked to hiring manager about another 30 mins. He asked about my background and a simple interview question. Then had the phone interview.
Here is the interesting thing: I didn't use Java for about 5 years but worked with C#, C++, C, Python etc. and worked on really high scale projects. They were looking for a Java engineer and they were concerned about my Java experience. During the interviews, they asked a lot of Java related questions and an easy interview questions. I solved all of them and the feedback was positive. However, they decided to stop the process since they didn't think my background was enough for the job description.
To me this is quite interesting. If you are going to eliminate the candidate based on his background and no matter how the candidate performs during the interview; why interview him? At latest the process should have stopped after talking to the hiring manager, even though I answered all his questions. Or if they let me know in the beginning of the process and say "We are looking for Java expert", I wouldn't waste their (and mine) time.
People I talked to on the phone were quite nice, but I didn't like the way the process went.