Great Netflix Data Engineer Interview Experience
I just went through 2 stages of the data engineering position and want to share some tips for those who are planning to go through it.
PS: I wasn't selected unfortunately but it was still a solid learning experience. Shoutout to the Recruiters, it was actually very nice contrary to what I've been seeing online.
Interview stages:
(1) Phone screen:
- Basic tell me regarding yourself and why you applied.
- What is the difference between a set and a list
- Different types of SQL JOINs
- Read up on the job and department you applied for
This round was fairly easy
After 5 days, I landed a mail for the next stage
(2) Technical Screening:
- A LOT of computer science trivia problems.
- Talk regarding projects you have worked on.
- Know everything you can regarding distributed computing concepts (and everything lol). They want to understand how much you know and how well you understand computing concepts.
- Understand the Hadoop ecosystem
- Read up on their Engineering blog, a lot of nice information is on there
- Few tech areas that were covered:
-- separate types of SQL JOINs
-- Understand the complexity of different search and sort algorithms with explanations as to why they are nice or bad. (binary search)
-- Questions on CI/CD and how they are handy
-- Map Reduce concepts and example of how to implement it (verbally)!!
-- Hadoop framework
-- Understand the CAP theorem
-- Understand probabilistic data structures
-- A bit on statistics
-- Understand unit testing and why they are key
-- Asynchronous
-- Hashing algorithms
Coding Part:
- String Manipulation questions in the language of your choice (do a ton of Leetcode and Hackerrank)
- A lot of simple SQL problems to find the top songs in a table etc.
- Read ALL the problems on Glassdoor! Almost all the areas listed on Glassdoor were questioned.
(3) Interview with 3 others (but I never made it this far)
After 2 days, I heard back from them.
SUMMARY:
Honestly, if you gig on really big data everyday, this should be a reasonable interview.
Best of luck.