Spotify Senior Data Scientist interview questions

I would not recommend anyone to apply to Spotify Data Science roles. I have interviewed multiple times for various Senior Data Scientist roles within Spotify. They do not have a team matching stage, so you have to restart a interview process every time you apply to a new team - although they might drop a technical interview if you succeeded in a previous one. The overall process takes a lot of time (just like in Google), with recruiter usually not giving you any sort of timeline and ignoring your follow-ups. If you don't succeed to on-site stage, they will ghost you. In one of my pipelines where I have reached an on-site, I had poor experience, especially with a take home assignment - Spotify provide you a dataset and ask you to build slide deck with insights you might extract out of it, without any problem statement. They might provide a 'question' that would be worded like 'Define best performing artist on the platform' but provide you no context on the challenges. The dataset is limited and does not reveal much. Take-home is also not time-limited, so you can really expect to spend from 3 to 16 hours on it without any reimbursement for your time, which is a disgrace for senior roles. On-site interviewers were mostly uninterested in replies, especially during the take-home part. Recruiter has offered to provide feedback after the rejection, but then ghosted me again after multiple follow ups, which tells a lot about their recruitment team.

I had a strongly negative interview process with Spotify. Similar to some other reviews, I was also passed between different recruiters and roles. Some companies like Facebook have a general interview process for data scientists, then a matching process to find the best team. Spotify does not do this so you have to repeat the interview process (basically everything after the technical screen) for every team you interview with. I was considered for three different teams during my process and have heard of other qualified candidates experiencing something similar. Ok, now that's out of the way... where do I start? - The quality of recruiters varies widely. Some are very helpful — they will make sure you are well prepared for the interviews, give detailed feedback, etc. Others just don't care as much and this can manifest in extremely delayed responses, rescheduling calls multiple times, or preemptively asking you questions like "Not that this will happen, but what if we consider you for a regular Data Science position?" - It takes a really long time to hear back after the final round, sometimes 3-4 weeks. Just complete radio silence. - Teams don't seem to speak to each other about candidates, even though they might get passed around. All in all, I probably met 20 different people and had to do repetitive interviews. My very last interview was a shorter version than the first two, but that also made the experience very impersonal. Interviewing is a hard process for anyone, even experienced candidates. I felt that the recruiting team *and* the hiring process is just very disrespectful to candidates and their time.