Netflix Distributed Systems Engineer 5 for the new Warsaw Data Platform team — owning internal datastores or experimentation infrastructure

A senior (7+ years) distributed systems role helping stand up Netflix's Data Platform presence in Poland, landing on either the Online Data Stores team (owning products like ZooKeeper) or the Experimentation Platform team (owning A/B test allocation data and the semantic metric layer). Requires deep experience building fault-tolerant distributed infrastructure, not application-level engineering.

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What this interview tests

Distributed data infrastructure design (fault tolerance, scalability, reliability)
Multi-threading and memory management depth in Java/C++/Python/Scala
Datastore internals (e.g., ZooKeeper-like coordination systems) or experimentation/A-B-testing allocation systems
Spark platform experience
Cross-functional/cross-team technical leadership
Open source contribution mindset (Netflix OSS)

Common question themes

Design a distributed coordination service (ZooKeeper-like) or an experiment-allocation and metrics pipeline

How would you evolve a legacy internal datastore while keeping it reliable during ownership handoff

Deep dive on multi-threading/concurrency bugs you've debugged in production

Describe leading a cross-functional initiative involving PMs and TPMs, not just engineers

How would you scale a system that must serve hundreds of concurrent A/B experiments reliably

Your experience with Spark for large-scale data processing

How candidates describe it

Real Distributed Systems Engineer 5 - Data Platform Poland interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

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