Senior SDE Interview Questions at Netflix

Design the video encoding pipeline that takes a raw uploaded file and produces multiple bitrate/resolution variants for adaptive streaming. How do you make this fault-tolerant and cost-efficient at scale?

Netflix popularized "chaos engineering" — explain what problem it actually solves that traditional testing doesn't, and how you would introduce it safely into a system that has never done it before.

One microservice in your call chain has started responding slowly (not failing, just slow). Explain how a circuit breaker and a timeout differ in protecting the rest of the system, and why you often need both.

Explain the difference between a blue-green deployment and a canary deployment. When would you choose canary over blue-green?

Netflix values "freedom and responsibility." Describe a time you were given an ambiguous problem with no clear owner and had to decide the scope yourself.

Kafka topics have a retention period, but consumer offsets also have their own retention. What happens if a consumer group is offline longer than the offset retention period?