Round: Full Journey · Type: Multiple Types · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 180 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly
Topics: Behavioral Questions, Data Modeling, System Design, Coding
Location: Los Gatos, CA
Interview date: 2025-12-01
Summary
Round 1: Behavioral (BQ)
Question: Standard behavioral questions. Questions about data modeling.
Round 2: System Design
Question: Design a billing system that supports 300 million subscriptions. The design should handle recursive billing, and I discussed using database scans with cron jobs and delay queues.
Round 3: Coding
Question: Given a history of users watching movies, find groups of users with the same last k movies. Follow-up: find pairs of users where at least m movies overlap in their last k movies.
similar to https://www.hack2hire.com/companies/netflix/coding-questions/68e2c587dab409e303d92946/practice?questionId=68e2d042dab409e303d92952
Details
Preparation Tips & Key Takeaways
What I Learned
I need to be prepared to discuss trade-offs between different system design approaches.
Practicing similar coding problems would have been beneficial.
Recommended Preparation
Coding Practice
Practice problems involving finding similar sets or patterns in data.
Focus on problems involving arrays and sets.
System Design
Study system design patterns for billing systems and handling large-scale subscriptions.
Review techniques for handling recursive billing and delayed tasks.
Behavioral Questions
Prepare STAR stories covering my experience with data modeling.
Resources I Recommend
Online resources and articles on designing scalable billing systems.
Practice coding problems on platforms like LeetCode.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Not considering the scalability of the billing system for a large number of subscriptions.
Not thoroughly testing the code for finding similar movie viewers with various inputs.