Build distributed control-plane systems for Netflix's global CDN (Open Connect)

Netflix is hiring a distributed systems engineer for the Open Connect Control Plane team, which builds the cloud services and steering algorithms behind Netflix's global CDN — covering on-demand streaming, live events, ad delivery, and network intelligence. The role requires strong Java, real-time distributed systems experience, and comfort working with large-scale data lakes.

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What this interview tests

Distributed systems: stateful/stateless design, Cassandra, Kafka
Java-based real-time, business-critical service design
CDN/control-plane concepts: traffic steering, capacity sharing, operational excellence
Data analysis over large-scale data lakes (Python, SQL, SparkSQL)
Operating under ambiguity and iterating on open-ended problems

Common question themes

Design a system that steers streaming traffic to the optimal CDN node under changing load

How would you architect a system to handle the largest live-streaming event ever attempted?

Tell me about a real-time, business-critical distributed system you built or operated — what broke and how did you diagnose it?

How do you use data from a large-scale data lake to inform a system design decision?

Describe a time you had to build something with significant ambiguity in the requirements

How candidates describe it

Real Software Engineer L5 - Open Connect Control Plane interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

Google · L5 Software EngineerNo offer

Google L5 software engineer interview: phone screening, three onsite rounds, system design, and a late rejection

A candidate interviewing for an L5 role went through a phone screening, three onsite coding rounds, a mobile system design round, and a Googleyness and Leadership round. Two of the four technical rounds went poorly by the candidate's own assessment, and after roughly two months of silence the recruiter reported that the role had been closed.

Interviewed January 2023 · Not specified

Google · L5 Software EngineerOffer

Google L5 software engineer interview: phone screen waived, vague onsite prompts, and an extra round before an offer

A senior software engineer with eight years of experience went through a Google L5 loop as part of a multi-company search that also produced offers from Bloomberg and Facebook. Google waived the phone screen and moved straight to a virtual onsite of three coding rounds, a system design round, and a Googlyness round; the panel then asked for two additional coding rounds and another system design round before the process concluded in an offer.

Interviewed 2021 · Not specified

Google · L3 Software EngineerOffer

Google L3 software engineer interview: phone screen, four coding rounds, and the Googleyness round

A candidate with two years of experience went from recruiter outreach to offer over about four months. The onsite was four 45-minute coding rounds — three of them featuring binary trees — and one round turned into a 25-minute chain of follow-ups about approximating an optimal solution at scale.

Interviewed June 2020 · Bangalore, IN

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