Software Engineer · Full Journey · Multiple Types

Netflix — Software Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Senior-Level

Round: Full Journey · Type: Multiple Types · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 120 min · Interviewer: Friendly

Topics: Data Deduplication, Sliding Window, Bit Manipulation, System Design, Communication Skills

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2026-01-10

Summary

Interview Rounds Overview

• Two rounds

Details

This was my interview experience for a general Software Engineer role at Netflix.

Round 1: Problem Solving

I interviewed with an interviewer and a shadow interviewer. The question was to design a home page de-duplication feature that supports horizontal and vertical scrolling. The interviewer gave very high-level requirements, and I had to clarify the input/output format and each requirement myself.

The input was a list of lists of show names. The interviewer said that ranking and recommendation were not needed, just deduplication. We discussed the design for about 15 minutes, and then I started coding and wrote test cases.

My approach was to maintain a global visited set and a local visited set for each row. I returned a list of lists of show names, looping through each row and adding the show name to the result list if it was not in either the global or local visited sets.

In the last 10 minutes, the interviewer asked me to discuss real-world production scenarios. I mentioned that a local cache cannot support large scale, and Redis Bloom filter could be used, but it would have false positives.

Round 2: Coding

The interviewer was very friendly. The round consisted of three parts, all related to deduplication:

1. Similar to LeetCode 485, input is a list of show names.
2. Similar to LeetCode 3, input is a list of show names, return the length of the longest continuous show list without duplicates. Solvable using the sliding window technique.
3. Given a list of show names, find the number of unique pairs without common characters. I used a brute force approach of comparing all pairs. The interviewer said it was acceptable but suggested using bitmasking, which I agreed with (though I didn't know how to do it).

Overall, I felt that Netflix places a strong emphasis on communication and clarification. It's important to think aloud and write code simultaneously, and to think of comprehensive test cases.

LeetCode similar: LeetCode 485, LeetCode 3