I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (Stockholm, Stockholm) in Sep 2019
Interview
It was a three steps interview, late 2019, I was rejected after the final step in Stockholm. First step: HR interview (remote) is a quick chat to assess the role fit. The second step is coding assessment (remote) on Scala, a few data engineering tasks, not really complex. The last step, the on-site all-day interview, expands into four 1-hour assessments: 1. case study: discuss an actual disruption they experienced and spot the underlying issue 2. system design: design a system supporting a dashboard showing metrics about played songs with a few filters, from client to server 3. whiteboard coding interview: implement a queue. Distributed map-reduce, explanation, how to handle sorting 4. behavioral assessment: an interview with psychologists, they wanted to understand me as a human being in a working place I suppose
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
design a system supporting a dashboard showing metrics about played songs with a few filters, from client to server whiteboard coding interview: implement a queue. Distributed map-reduce, explanation, how to handle sorting
There were 5 different steps:
1. Phone round
2. General interview
3. Coding Round 1
4. Coding Round 2
5. HR round
Getting selected in all these rounds is necessary. Interview was mostly remote via zoom.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Binary Search-related questions. Also, graph- and tree-related questions were asked in coding interviews.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify
Interview
Recruiter emailed me to schedule a call based on his availability with a calendly link. I’ve scheduled according to the recruiter’s availability. Waited for 30 mins for the call at the scheduled time but haven’t received a call. When I emailed the recruiter about the same, he said sorry and asked to reschedule. I did the same and reacheduled accordingly but this time the recruiter again didn’t show up nor responded to my email. Very worse behavior and unprofessional behavior from such a big company.
I applied online. I interviewed at Spotify in Jun 2022
Interview
After submitting my resume I was contacted by a recruiter. The process consists of two rounds of interviews.
The first round is one technical interview with two engineers. It covers CS basics, a project discussion and a simple coding questions.
Four separate interviews make up the second round. Each one is a hour long. The order of interviews isn't fixed and you may spread them out over two days. The interviews are: Behavioural ("values"), system design, programming and "data".
Getting feedback in-between the interviews and booking the next round took a lot of time and emails.
Interview questions [7]
Question 1
Round 1: Discuss a project related to data engineering. Challenges, conflicts, what to do differently.
Round 1: Technical questions
- Common data structures and algorithms (search in sorted list, search in linked list, red-black-tree)
- How would you implement a priority queue?
- HashMap collision resolution strategies
- Examples of probabilistic data structures, advantages
- Difference between functional and imperative programming.
- How would you represent a graph in-memory?
- Difference between columnar and row based database.
- Difference between inner and outer join.
- Explain MapReduce.
Round 2: Data
- You are given a data set of song "plays" and metadata (song, artists etc.)
- Design a data solution to calculate the top artists per country