Data Engineer · Phone Screen · Technical Discussion

Netflix — Data Engineer

Level: Mid-Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Technical Discussion · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly

Topics: Data Modeling, SQL, ETL, Data Pipelines, Python

Location: Los Gatos, CA

Interview date: 2025-05-15

Summary

I had a technical interview focused on data engineering problems. I was asked to design a data pipeline to find the most popular movies and recommend what movie a viewer should watch next.

Details

The technical interview consisted of a data problem that wasn't in LeetCode style.

The problem was: find the most popular movies watched by viewers, and based on that, recommend which movie they should watch next.

1. Data Collection: I was asked what data I would collect and how I would model it. I had to write SQL queries to answer the question.
2. Pipeline Design: I had to design the data pipeline, including the technology stack and the ETL process.
3. Data Sample Analysis: Given a data sample, I had to write Python code to find the top popular movie and the next movie to watch. I was then asked how to modify the code to find any K number of top movies, instead of just the absolute top movie.

Overall, I felt the interview experience was positive. The interviewer was willing to provide hints, but I needed the hints to remember some details. My overall performance was not the best.