Netflix Business Context & Data Engineering Role Questions
Understanding Netflix's business model, product strategy, and organizational context, with a focus on the Data Engineering role. Covers how Netflix operates in streaming, content recommendations, data platforms, and data engineering responsibilities, including data pipelines, platform architecture, and how business goals drive data work within Netflix.
MediumTechnical
36 practiced
Write SQL (standard SQL compatible with BigQuery/Postgres) to compute daily active users (DAU) and median session length per country from the table 'playback_events'. Schema:playback_events ( event_id STRING PRIMARY KEY, user_id STRING, session_id STRING, event_time TIMESTAMP, event_type STRING, -- 'start', 'heartbeat', 'stop' event_duration_seconds INT, country STRING)Return one row per date and country with columns: date, country, dau, median_session_seconds. Explain assumptions for NULLs and sessions that span midnight.
EasyTechnical
41 practiced
What QoE (Quality of Experience) metrics does Netflix typically track (for example: startup time, rebuffer rate, average bitrate, playback failures)? For each metric explain the data sources, how you'd instrument collection, and how a Solutions Architect would expose these metrics to product and operations teams with appropriate aggregation windows.
MediumTechnical
40 practiced
You are advising Netflix on migrating legacy on-prem ETL jobs to a cloud-managed analytics platform. Provide a migration strategy that minimizes risk and downtime, including discovery and categorization of jobs, dependency mapping, a parallel-run strategy, data validation checkpoints, cutover sequencing, rollback plans, and stakeholder communication cadence.
HardSystem Design
48 practiced
Design a disaster recovery plan for Netflix's critical data pipelines (recommendation features and billing data). Define RPO and RTO targets, cross-region replication strategies, consistent snapshotting, how to detect partial writes or corruption, and the playbook for failover and rollback.
EasyTechnical
48 practiced
List and describe the primary data sources Netflix ingests to support product, personalization, and operations. For each source (for example: client playback events, CDN logs, billing/membership events, studio metadata, partner measurement), explain typical event volume characteristics, cardinality, and immediate downstream consumers.
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