Pretty standard interview process for a big tech company:
- Screening interview through hangouts with a recruiter, they go over your CV and ask open ended questions about you and what makes you tick. They focus on breaking down what kind of personality you bring and check on behavioral questions.
- 1,5 hr hangouts interview with 2 backend engineers, this phase you will have a split of trivia engineering questions, describe a previous engineering project with enough detail & problems solving a programming task with a shared coding pad. They want to see how comfortable are you solving a task and expressing your ideas during the process.
-1 full day on-site interview, consisted of 4 interviews + 1 lunch interview.
They send you quite well in time, the agenda in detail & the interviewers conducting the interview.
At the beginning of the day, one of the recruiters will receive you and welcome you; making sure you are comfortable and ready to start the show during the whole day.
Each interview round in the onsite, consists of 2 people (a leader + a shadow).
In the culture fit interview, they will try to breakdown your personality, way of interacting with people and how do you tackle everyday issues like conflicts or bringing agreement.
In the live coding interview, you will be given a laptop to you, and you will be asked to do both a code review and solve another coding problem. Same applies as the previous 1,5h online interview, except that this time the task is more advanced.
In the System Design interview, you will get an open ended problem for you to decide how to build and scale. Here, they value how do you explain from high level perspective up to internal details.
In the use case interview, you are placed in context on an outage of large system and do some roleplaying.
You will have an hour with the engineers where you will need figure out how to diagnose and locate the issue and later finding a way to fix the outage. You will be given tools & information based on the type of outage and you will need to tell the interviewer the actions you will do and your thinking process. You will get feedback on your actions and try to guide you on the correct path.
The lunch interview is with other engineers from Spotify which is the perfect moment for you to get a grasp of the company and other aspects you want to know through their employees.
They try to allocate the interviewers based on the possible teams that you could work with, although I found out that they are pretty open until the end, they still consider you to other teams that do not conduct the core technical interviews if you seem to show a very good culture fit through out the process.
I must say, the on-site was pretty intense and each part nailed down to extract what they exactly needed to know about you. It was a hard process but overall, it felt fair and enjoyable.
