just wrapped up my Netflix senior SWE loop last month so sharing notes while everything's still fresh.
the system design round was 60 minutes, one interviewer, no warm-up problem. you are immediately in it. mine was a streaming-adjacent design: design the notification delivery system for an app at Netflix-scale. no hints about which layer to focus on, which i think is intentional. they want to see how you scope.
what i observed mattered most:
scope before building. i spent probably 10 minutes just asking questions and deciding what to prioritize. the interviewer flagged it positively in debrief (i know because the recruiter mentioned feedback themes). at other FAANG-tier companies i've been pushed to start drawing boxes faster.
go deep on one part. once we agreed on scope i picked the fan-out delivery layer and went deep: message queues, idempotency keys, delivery receipts, exactly-once vs at-least-once trade-offs. they did not ask me to cover everything; they asked me to defend my choices.
they will challenge you. around minute 40 the interviewer said "what if this part fails at 2am and you're not on-call" - basically stress testing incident response thinking. not gotcha. genuinely curious how i'd make the system resilient and operable.
comp calibration point: i was interviewing for a senior/L5 equivalent role, bay area. final offer range i've seen floating around for that band in 2026 is roughly 400-500k TC depending on stock refreshes. mine came in around the middle of that; i negotiated up a little.
overall: the system design bar felt high but fair. they are not trapping you on trivia. they want to understand how you think through ambiguous scale problems, which is very on-brand for a company running 260M+ subscriber streams simultaneously.
one more thing: the "keeper test" culture is real and it comes up in system design too. they want systems that a senior engineer could own and explain clearly. over-complex designs seem to get flagged the same way as under-specified ones.