Hi, I'm Leo. I graduated from UCLA last year and I'm now working as a software engineer at Netflix. I wanted to share my interview experience in case it helps others—especially international students—who are going through the job hunt in North America.
Netflix interviews are known to be tough, especially for SDE roles. They care not only about your technical skills but also about how well you align with their culture. I applied for a new grad role and honestly didn’t expect much at first. But I had included a small distributed systems project on my resume, and surprisingly, that helped me land the online assessment.
The Netflix OA felt different from most other companies. It wasn’t just about solving algorithm problems—it was more like a real-world engineering exercise. One of the questions I remember clearly involved optimizing video caching. At first glance, it seemed like a standard LRU cache problem, but it actually required designing a strategy that factored in usage patterns and bandwidth differences across regions. I ended up using a combination of a priority queue and a doubly linked list, but it took some serious time to think through the scenario.
The technical interviews were another level up. The first round was a system design interview led by a senior engineer. The question was: “Design the backend architecture for a recommendation system.” The interviewer really pushed me to think beyond just getting something working—he cared about scalability, fault tolerance, and long-term maintainability. The second round was a coding challenge, focused on multithreaded data processing. I used Java, and even though I didn’t finish writing the full solution, I clearly explained my core logic and how I was handling thread safety. The interviewer appreciated that more than a perfect answer.
The most unique part was the final round, the so-called "Values Interview." This wasn’t your typical behavioral round. The interviewer asked very specific questions about my past experiences: times I chose transparency over convenience, or when I held a high standard even if it meant pushing back on an immature idea. I shared a story about a disagreement with a product manager over feature priorities, and to my surprise, the interviewer really resonated with it. It showed them I cared about the bigger picture, not just finishing tasks.
Looking back, I realized Netflix isn’t just hiring strong coders. They want people who grow with the team, can handle pressure, and have depth in how they think. If I could do it again, I’d start preparing earlier for system design and behavioral interviews. For international students, communication is definitely a challenge, but don’t let fear of making mistakes hold you back. What matters most is being able to clearly show how you think through problems.
Release time:2025-05-12
