Key takeaways
Netflix publishes little about its loop. New grad interviews typically run a take-home assessment followed by two rounds. For experienced engineers, the only first-party account is a 2022 Netflix Tech Blog post describing a recruiter screen, a manager screen, a technical screen, a first round of four or five 45-minute interviews, and a second round of two or three more focused on cross-team work.
What Netflix does publish exhaustively is its culture. Sergio Ezama, Netflix's chief talent officer, described the June 2024 culture memo rewrite as "12 months in the making, with every employee given the chance to weigh in," drawing over 1,500 comments, and Netflix tells candidates outright that they may be asked which parts of the memo they disagree with. That puts Netflix near the top of the industry for what it publishes about how the company works and near the bottom for what it publishes about how it interviews. Preparation that would go into reverse-engineering rounds at another employer goes into the memo here.
Why does the Netflix culture memo matter for interviews?
Everything else at Netflix hangs off one document, so start there.
The Netflix culture memo was rewritten and republished in June 2024, after the twelve-month, 1,500-comment revision Netflix announced at the time. If you read a version describing "Valued Behaviors," you are reading the retired 2023 text.
The current memo organizes around four ideas. The Dream Team. People Over Process. Uncomfortably Exciting. Great and Always Better.
The passage doing the most work is this one: "It's why we model ourselves on a professional sports team, not a family. Families are about unconditional love. They can also be dysfunctional, as anyone who's watched Ozark or Wednesday knows. Professional sports teams, on the other hand, focus on performance and picking the right person for every position, even when that means swapping out someone they love for a better player."
The memo also says, plainly, "Netflix is not for everyone, so please read on." Take that at face value. It is a filtering document, and it is doing its job on you while you read it.
What are the eight Netflix values?
Netflix names eight values in the memo. Selflessness. Judgment. Candor. Creativity. Courage. Inclusion. Curiosity. Resilience.
Three of those are new as of the 2024 rewrite: candor, creativity, and resilience. Four were dropped: communication, integrity, passion, and innovation. If your prep material lists passion or integrity as Netflix values, it predates June 2024.
Candor is the one to sit with, because it connects directly to that instruction about disagreeing with the memo. Netflix defines it as "You willingly receive and give feedback; you are open about what's working and what needs to improve; you admit mistakes openly and share learnings widely." Being asked which parts of the memo you reject is that value administered as an interview question. A candidate who says everything resonated has, in Netflix's own terms, failed to demonstrate candor while claiming to admire it.
Worth naming what does not exist. Netflix publishes no scoring rubric, no competency scale, no leveling guide. The numbered Netflix rubrics circulating on prep sites carry no Netflix source. The eight values are the whole published rubric.
How many interview rounds does Netflix have?
For early-career roles, Netflix publishes specifics. Its new grad page says interviews "typically include a take-home assessment followed by two rounds of interviews, with advancement based on the feedback at each stage," evaluating technical (where applicable), role-specific, and behavioral skills. The internship page describes a take-home followed by roughly two to three rounds.
For experienced hires, the only first-party account is a Netflix Tech Blog post from February 2022 by Karen Casella, then a director of engineering. It is four years old, and it covers backend engineering specifically, so treat it as the best available source rather than current documentation. Casella described a recruiter phone screen, a manager phone screen, a technical screen offering a choice between a take-home exercise and an hour with an engineer, then two rounds. Round one is "with four or five people for 45 minutes each," with a panel of two or three engineers plus the hiring manager and recruiter. Round two is two or three more people, an engineering director, a partner engineer or manager, and another engineering leader, focused on "how well you partner with other teams and your non-technical skills."
That second round is the structural detail worth preparing for. It is staffed by people outside the hiring team, and it is explicitly about cross-team work rather than technical depth. It is closer in shape to the cross-functional rounds in the Apple hiring process than to the committee stage in the Google hiring process, where the deciding read happens on paper after you leave. Candidates who spend all their preparation on the first round walk into the second one cold.
Who decides is not published. Netflix has no documented hiring committee, and the memo's line about avoiding "decision-making by committee" in favor of "an informed captain" describes how Netflix makes decisions in general and says nothing specific about hiring. Anyone telling you the Netflix loop requires unanimous interviewer agreement is quoting prep content, because Netflix has published no such rule.
When does Netflix hire new grads, and what about non-technical roles?
Netflix's new grad page also covers timing. It says new grad roles are "typically posted in late September or October," and that availability varies each year depending on hiring needs. If you are a final-year student reading this in the autumn, the window the page names is this one, and Netflix asks you to revisit the site during that period for the latest openings.
The same page answers a question candidates often search for, which is whether the process looks different outside engineering. Netflix hires new graduates "across both technical and business functions within the United States," and says interviewers evaluate "technical (if applicable), role-specific, and behavioral skills." The page adds that "your experience will be customized by role," so treat the take-home-then-two-rounds description as Netflix's broad overview. What the parenthesis does settle is that the technical evaluation applies only where the role calls for it, while role-specific and behavioral evaluation are listed for every new grad candidate. Netflix's own preparation advice on that page is three lines long. Incorporate the culture throughout your interview, prepare to talk about the projects on your resume, and practice technical fundamentals if you are a software engineering candidate.
What is the Netflix keeper test?
The keeper test is the most cited thing about Netflix and the most misapplied. Here is the actual text from the memo:
"We expect leaders to be strong developers of talent. And to ensure they have the right player at every position, we ask them to apply what we call the 'keeper test' – asking 'if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?' Or 'knowing everything I know today, would I hire X again?' If the answer is no, we believe it's fairer to everyone to part ways quickly."
Note who applies it and to whom. The memo hands the test to leaders and points it at the people already on their teams. The phrasing that sounds hiring-adjacent, "would I hire X again," is retrospective about an incumbent, and the memo does not extend the test to candidates.
The keeper test is best read as a description of the job itself rather than of the interview. It tells you what continued employment at Netflix feels like, which makes it a question about whether you want the role rather than a tactic for winning it. Use it as a stakes calculation. You would be joining a company where your manager re-asks the hire question continuously.
Two changes in the 2024 rewrite are worth knowing. Netflix added a short passage softening the test, noting that "in the abstract, the keeper test can sound scary," encouraging regular manager conversations so there are no surprises, and saying managers "evaluate team members on their whole record, rather than focusing on the mistakes or bets that didn't pay off." Netflix also removed the 2023 memo's promise that people who do not pass the test receive "a generous severance package." The severance language is simply gone from the published document. If severance matters to your decision, ask about it directly rather than assuming the old memo still applies.
Does Netflix pay bonuses on top of salary?
Netflix pays what it calls personal top of market, described in the memo as "a judgment about what that person could make in a similar role at another company, and what we would pay to keep or replace them." Its work-life philosophy page adds the part that changes how you should negotiate: "We do not think of these as 'raises' and there is no raise pool to divide up. The market for talent is what it is and is not defined by set bands and grades."
Netflix job postings state that compensation "consists solely of an annual salary; we do not have bonuses," and that employees choose each year how much to take as salary versus stock options. Netflix's FY2025 annual report repeats this, saying employees "generally are able to choose the form of their compensation between cash and stock options." The same filing says those options are granted on a monthly basis. The annual choice is the one you make. The monthly cadence is when grants land.
The practical consequence is that a Netflix posted range is close to total compensation. At most large tech companies, a posted base range excludes bonus and equity, so the real number is higher than the listing. At Netflix, the listing is the number, and any equity you take is converted out of it. Compare a Netflix range against a Google or Meta base range only after adding their bonus and equity to the other side.
One caveat. The exhibit list of Netflix's annual report includes a Performance Bonus Plan, so the company does have one. The no-bonus language quoted above comes from the job postings themselves, which describe the roles candidates actually apply for.
What the prep sites get wrong
Treating the keeper test as an interview question. It is a management practice applied to employees. Preparing to "pass the keeper test" in a loop is preparing for something that is not happening in the room.
Reading Netflix as a company in retreat. Netflix's FY2025 annual report states "approximately 16,000 full-time employees" as of December 31, 2025. That is up from roughly 14,000 in the prior year's filing.
Deadline reported February 2026 cuts in the product division at several dozen roles, which its sources put at under 1% of that division, as part of a reorganization. Netflix declined to comment. Hiring content that frames Netflix as contracting is reading a reorg as a retreat. The most recent full year in Netflix's filings, 2025, shows headcount growing.
Assuming a remote or hybrid policy. Neither the culture memo nor the work-life philosophy page contains a return-to-office policy. Job postings are individually marked onsite or remote, and that listing is the only signal. Ask about the specific role.
Expecting guidance on AI use. Netflix's new grad and internship pages, the pages that describe its interviews, say nothing about whether candidates may use AI tools while preparing or interviewing. Where a company's interview pages are silent, ask the recruiter rather than assuming permission or prohibition.
How to prepare
- Read the current memo end to end, from jobs.netflix.com/culture, not a summary. It runs long by corporate standards and the summaries lose the parts that carry the tone.
- Pick two or three passages you genuinely disagree with or find hard, and write out why. Netflix told you this question is coming. Arriving without an answer reads as either not having read it or not being willing to say.
- Write one story for each of the eight values, weighting candor, resilience, and creativity since those are the newest and the least likely to be in stale prep material. The STAR method keeps them tight, and the behavioral interview guide covers how to structure them under follow-up.
- Ask the recruiter in the first screen what level the role is scoped at, since Netflix publishes no leveling guide and the posted salary range is close to the whole package.
- Prepare separately for a cross-team round. Bring examples of working with partner teams, resolving disagreements across org lines, and operating without authority.
- Model the offer as total compensation before you compare it to anything, because there is no bonus coming and no equity on top.
- Say your memo answer out loud before the interview. A view you have only written down tends to come out hedged, and hedging is the opposite of the value being tested. Voice mock interviews are built for exactly that gap, and they count it rather than guess at it, returning how often you hedged alongside your rate of um and uh and your words per minute, all computed from your own recording.
What to do with all this
Netflix runs an unusually legible process wrapped in an unusually opaque one. The values are published, the pay model is published, the culture document is published and updated in public with a changelog you can diff against the old version. The loop itself is barely documented at all.
That combination tells you where to spend your preparation. Spend it on the document Netflix wrote, revised over twelve months, and then told you to come argue with, and spend less on reverse-engineering a round structure Netflix has never confirmed. Arguing with a document is a spoken skill, and our ranking of the best mock interview platforms covers where to practice making that case out loud.
