A Software Engineer at Tubi plays a critical role in shaping the technology that powers a leading, high-scale, ad-supported streaming service. This position is responsible for building and maintaining services that deliver seamless entertainment to millions of active users. Because Tubi handles massive traffic and high concurrency, engineers here work on challenging, real-world problems that directly impact the reliability, speed, and overall user experience of the platform.

The impact of this role spans multiple critical technical domains. Depending on your specialization, you will contribute to high-performance backend microservices, robust video transcoding pipelines, or highly responsive frontend interfaces. The work involves orchestrating distributed systems, optimizing video delivery networks, and scaling cloud infrastructure. This requires a deep appreciation for system efficiency and clean architecture.

What makes engineering at Tubi distinct is the unique blend of a fast-growing, data-driven culture and a highly complex technical stack. Working with tools like Elixir, Scala, React, and AWS, you will collaborate across distributed teams to solve scalability challenges that few other streaming platforms face. For candidates who thrive on solving high-throughput system challenges and building resilient software, this role offers an exceptionally rewarding and high-impact career path.

To help you prepare effectively, we have analyzed real reported interview experiences to identify the most common questions asked during the Tubi hiring process. These questions are representative of what you can expect and are grouped by core technical and behavioral categories. Use them to identify patterns in how Tubi evaluates candidates rather than memorizing specific answers.

Coding & Practical Problem Solving

These questions evaluate your core computer science fundamentals, coding speed, and ability to translate logical requirements into clean, working code.

• Implement a solution to find the Top K Elements in a stream or dataset, and be prepared to discuss the exact time and space complexity of your approach.
• Write a complete, runnable program from scratch to parse a large log file, extract specific metrics, and output the structured results.

Preparing for an interview at Tubi requires a balanced approach that covers both deep technical execution and structured system design. Interviewers look for candidates who can write practical, production-ready code while keeping scalability and performance in mind.

Role-Related Knowledge – You must demonstrate a strong command of your primary stack, whether that is backend systems or frontend frameworks. For backend candidates, a solid understanding of concurrency models, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure (particularly AWS) is essential. Frontend candidates should be highly proficient in modern JavaScript, state management, and building performant UI components.

Problem-Solving Ability – Tubi values practical coding over abstract, highly theoretical algorithm puzzles. You will be evaluated on your ability to break down ambiguous problems, structure your code cleanly, and write runnable programs from scratch. Be prepared to explain your thought process out loud and discuss the trade-offs of your implementation.

System Design & Scalability – Because of Tubi's massive scale, you must show that you can design systems capable of handling high throughput and low latency. Focus on data flow, caching strategies, database selection, and failure handling. Your ability to justify your architectural choices under realistic constraints is critical.

Culture Fit & Communication – Collaboration is key at Tubi. You will need to show that you are receptive to feedback, can communicate complex technical ideas clearly, and are comfortable working with distributed teams. Be ready to discuss your past experiences with honesty and highlight how you navigate technical disagreements.

The interview process for a Software Engineer at Tubi is structured to evaluate your hands-on coding skills, architectural thinking, and alignment with the team's culture. The overall process typically takes between two to four weeks from the initial screen to the final decision, depending on scheduling and team availability.

The journey begins with a recruiter screen, followed by technical phone screens that focus on live coding or domain-specific questions. If you pass these initial rounds, you will move to the virtual or in-person onsite loop. This loop includes deep-dive coding sessions, system design assessments, and conversations with engineering leadership, including the CTO or VP of Engineering.

Tubi's engineering philosophy emphasizes practical, real-world skills over rote memorization. They want to see how you write code in a realistic environment, how you collaborate with interviewers, and how you approach complex scalability issues.

The visual timeline above outlines the typical progression a candidate goes through during the hiring loop. You should use this sequence to pace your preparation, focusing first on core coding execution before diving deep into complex system design and leadership scenarios. While the exact order of rounds can occasionally vary by team or seniority level, the transition from high-level screening to intense technical evaluation remains consistent.

To succeed at Tubi, you need to understand the specific technical areas where candidates are evaluated most rigorously. The interview loops are designed to test your depth in several core competencies.

Practical Coding & Development

This area goes beyond standard whiteboard algorithms to evaluate your ability to write clean, maintainable, and working code under time constraints. Interviewers want to see how you organize files, handle errors, and structure logic.

Be ready to go over:

• File Parsing and I/O – Writing utility programs that read, process, and output structured data from raw files.
• State Management – Managing application state efficiently, especially when dealing with asynchronous events or complex UI structures.
• Testing and Debugging – Writing basic unit tests or explaining how you would verify the correctness of your code.

Example scenarios:

• "Write a program from scratch that parses a custom configuration file, handles syntax errors gracefully, and outputs a JSON representation."
• "Implement a small, interactive UI component in React that fetches data from an API, manages loading states, and handles pagination."

Backend Architecture & Concurrency

For backend-focused roles, Tubi places a strong emphasis on high concurrency, distributed systems, and efficient resource utilization. They want to know how you build services that do not break under massive user loads.

Be ready to go over:

• Concurrency Models – Understanding actor models, multithreading, or event loops, and how they apply to languages like Elixir or Scala.
• Data Consistency – Handling distributed state, race conditions, and choosing the right database isolation levels.
• API Design – Designing robust, low-latency APIs that can be easily consumed by client applications.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Actor-based state distribution, custom protocol parsing, and high-throughput message queue tuning.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a rate-limiting middleware that can be distributed across multiple API gateway instances."
• "Explain how you would handle real-time data synchronization across a cluster of backend nodes without causing split-brain scenarios."

System Design & Cloud Infrastructure

This evaluation area tests your ability to architect large-scale systems using modern cloud infrastructure, with a particular focus on AWS services and distributed data patterns.

Be ready to go over:

• Scalability and Caching – Implementing multi-tier caching, CDN strategies, and database read replicas.
• Microservice Orchestration – Managing service-to-service communication, service discovery, and container deployment using Kubernetes.
• Storage and Data Pipelines – Choosing between SQL and NoSQL databases, and designing pipelines for real-time data processing.

Example scenarios:

• "Architect a system that tracks video playback progress for millions of concurrent users, ensuring that users can resume watching from the exact second they left off on any device."
• "Design a fault-tolerant, distributed media ingestion pipeline that automatically transcodes uploaded videos into multiple resolutions."