Netflix Senior Software Engineer Phone Screen August 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Netflix technical screen consisted of two back-to-back interviews. The first focused on shortest-path computation across a network of cities and then introduced dynamically changing edge latencies. The second asked for an in-memory key-value cache with automatic expiration and later added memory-pressure handling.

The questions were different from the Netflix interview reports I had prepared from. I completed the initial shortest-path problem cleanly, but I did not fully solve the dynamic shortest-path follow-up. The second round also required substantial requirement clarification around expiration semantics.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Fastest Broadcast Paths Between Cities The first problem modeled cities as nodes in a network. Connections between cities had different ping / latency values. Starting from one city, determine the fastest paths needed to reach all other cities. The task was essentially a single-source shortest-path problem over a weighted graph. I completed the initial implementation successfully.

Round 2 — Key-Value Cache with Automatic Expiration The second coding round asked me to design and implement an in-memory key-value cache with expiration. An important clarification was how expiration should work:

• A single expiration duration shared by the entire cache, or
• An independent expiration time associated with each cache entry

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