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Great Netflix Data Engineer Interview Experience

Great Netflix Data Engineer Interview Experience

BLACKSMITHwendigo555·

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.

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7 comments

You didn't earn it to the onsite? I had a similar background for my phone screen for SWE.

A lot of questions regarding computing in general from garbage collection to distributed systems to monitoring/alerting.

I actually enjoyed that as it'll filter out leetcode warriors who otherwise don't realize much about software.

99

Exactly!

92

This sounds like SWE-Data not data engineer. Most DE just gig with SQL and maybe Python pipelines, so surprised you were tested for DS/Algo

87

Thanks for sharing, this is for which location and level ?

105

Not sure what level the job was as it wasn't specified, but it was for Stockholm

87

Thank you OP

76

Thanks so much for sharing this info..

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