did the Netflix coding round in february as part of a senior frontend SWE loop. wanted to document this because i couldn't find clean info on what the coding portion actually looked like before i went in.
format: two coding problems, 60 minutes total, Coderpad. no timed OA beforehand - the coding happened during a live interview with an engineer watching. you can use any language; i used JavaScript, they were fine with it. don't assume you need Python.
difficulty: one medium, one medium-hard. the medium was a string manipulation problem i'd seen a variant of on Leetcode. the medium-hard involved a graph traversal with a twist - there was a constraint that made the naive BFS solution too slow and you needed to think about it differently. i got the core solution but didn't fully optimize in time.
what they cared about beyond just solving it: talking out loud about your approach before typing. i almost made the mistake of jumping in. paused, explained my thinking, and they pushed back gently which helped me catch an edge case. code clarity. Netflix is famous for caring about maintainable code, and even in a 30-minute coding slot the engineer noted when i named a variable well or left a comment explaining a non-obvious step. handling partial solutions gracefully. i didn't finish the second problem fully optimized and the engineer asked me to walk through what the runtime would be and what i'd do to improve it if i had more time. that conversation seemed to matter.
what i'd do differently: i practiced mostly on random Leetcode mediums but would now specifically drill graph problems and problems with tricky constraints. the "medium-hard" category is where Netflix seems to live for senior-level coding.
no dynamic programming marathon, no crazy tricks. they just want to see that you can write clean code under mild pressure and communicate clearly while doing it. came out feeling okay about this round even though i didn't finish everything.