I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in Jun 2016
Interview
I was excited to be interviewing with Spotify as its a great product and has established itself to be better than competitors. The recruiters were very prompt at reaching out soon after I submitted an application online.
I first had call with the recruiter asking about my interests and talking about the position. She set up a skype interview with member from hiring team. The guy was genuinely interested in my past projects and started off by asking some details over resume. He then asked me a coding question, fairly simple string reverse which he then asked to used for sentence reversing. I cleared that interview.
Next was onsite interview. There were 4 rounds of 1 hour each with only a minute or two of break.
First one focused on behavioral questions.
Second one on system design.
Third one on big data and machine learning(this was bit of a surprise because recruiter didn't inform me that they were trying to check me on data engineer role too)
Fourth one on designing a game and writing code pieces
After that I was given tour of the office and ended my interview on a good note.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England)
Interview
I had an intital interview, but I knew I would fail, The recruiter seemed disinterested and moody like tired. I got asked the typical questions like salary and stuff, but I knew I was going to fail the interview due to the above.
I think if I had a different more professional interviewer I would have passed.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England) in Apr 2025
Interview
I had 3 rounds:
1. Phone screening with hiring manager: my background, feedback culture. Fairly standard.
2. Technical screening with 2 engineers: tell in depth about one of my recent projects, general technical questions (TCP/UPD, DNS, etc). One easy LeetCode problem.
3. 4 interviews on last stage: values, algo & ds, system design, case study.
Values - normal set of values/behavioral questions that should be answered with STAR.
Algo & DS - 1 medium LeetCode problem.
System Design - basic system design task, not complex system.
Case study - debug previously occurred production incident.
Interview process was good, hiring manager kept me updated during whole process and helped a lot. Interviewers were great and friendly, I did not feel like it was "gotcha" type of interviews, but rather they genuinely tried to know more about me.
My advice: clearly explain and speak aloud your thought process on technical interviews, and prepare STAR format answers for most commonly asked values questions in advance and memorize your answers.
1 phone screen, and onsite 1 technical, 1 system design, behavioral, and case study. All leetcode style. Traditional. They are very slow however. They will compare you with other candidates and get all the feedback at once. It's an employers market most definitely.