Netflix publishes an unusual instruction to candidates. On its new grad and internship pages, under a note about work culture, it says: "You may be asked about which aspects of the memo resonate most with you – or not – so be prepared."
Read that middle clause again. Netflix is telling you to arrive ready to name the parts of its own culture document you do not agree with. No other large tech company hands candidates its founding text and then asks which bits they would push back on.
That instruction is also close to the only thing Netflix publishes about how it interviews. There is no "how we hire" page, no process overview, no hiring FAQ. Most of what circulates about the Netflix loop is reconstructed from candidate write-ups. So this guide separates the two carefully. What Netflix says, and what people report.
The memo is the syllabus
Start with the document, because everything else at Netflix hangs off it.
The Netflix culture memo was rewritten and republished in June 2024. Sergio Ezama, Netflix's chief talent officer, described the rewrite as "12 months in the making, with every employee given the chance to weigh in," drawing over 1,500 comments. 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.
The eight values, and which ones are new
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. Every numbered Netflix rubric circulating online was reconstructed by candidates. The eight values are the whole published rubric.
What Netflix actually says about its interview process
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, 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" is about decisions generally, not hiring specifically. Anyone telling you the Netflix loop requires unanimous interviewer agreement is quoting prep content, not Netflix.
What the keeper test actually governs
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. Leaders apply it to the people already on their teams. Netflix has never published anything applying the keeper test to candidates, and the phrasing that sounds hiring-adjacent, "would I hire X again," is retrospective about an incumbent.
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 three sentences 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.
Compensation, and why the posted range means something different here
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." Those options are granted monthly and, per Netflix's own description, are fully vested with a ten-year life. The annual choice is the one you make. The monthly cadence is just 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 the equity is a conversion of it rather than an addition to it. Comparing a Netflix range against a Google or Meta base range without adjusting for that is the single most common way candidates misread a Netflix offer.
One exception exists. Netflix does run a performance-based cash bonus plan, but it applies only to executive officers, a group of about five people. For everyone else the no-bonus model holds.
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, up from the roughly 14,000 reported 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 while headcount grew by about 2,000 over the same year.
Assuming a remote or hybrid policy. Netflix publishes no return-to-office policy at all. Neither the culture memo nor the work-life philosophy page contains one. 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 has published nothing about whether candidates may use AI tools while preparing or interviewing. Its candidate privacy notice does not mention automated screening either. Where a company is 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.
- Check the open roles and levels on our Netflix company page before the recruiter screen, so you know which band you are being screened against.
- 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.
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. Not on reverse-engineering a round structure Netflix has never confirmed, but on the document Netflix wrote, revised over twelve months, and then told you to come argue with.