Netflix
Senior
Senior Data Engineer (L5) building distributed data pipelines and platforms across Netflix's Growth, Finance, Product, Content, and Studio domains
A senior IC data engineering role (Netflix L5, comp $380K-$610K) responsible for building both batch and real-time data pipelines and modeling data that powers analytics and product features at Netflix's streaming scale. The role expects deep proficiency in at least one major language plus SQL, hands-on experience with distributed processing engines like Spark or Flink, and strong data intuition, documentation, and debugging discipline.
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What this interview tests
- Distributed data processing at web scale (Spark/Flink)
- Batch pipeline design vs. real-time processing services
- Data modeling for analytics and product features
- Data quality intuition and debugging
- SQL proficiency and independent technology adoption
Common question themes
Walk me through the most complex Spark or Flink pipeline you've built — what broke and how did you fix it
Compare your approach to a batch pipeline for a business metric versus a real-time service feeding a product feature
Tell me about a data quality issue you caught before it corrupted downstream analytics or ML models
Describe a data model you designed and the tradeoffs between flexibility and query performance
Tell me about a time you learned a new distributed systems technology independently to solve a problem
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