Spotify Backend Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I talked to the recruiter first about the job and Spotify. Then I had a 70-minute technical interview with two engineers, which went well. The recruiter then messaged me to set up more interviews. I sent my availability, but I never heard back. I emailed again a few days later, and still no reply. I tried one last time a week later with another email. Still no response. I put in a lot of effort preparing for these interviews and I can't even get a response back. This feels really unprofessional and makes Spotify look bad.

Got referred by a Spotify employee but I don't think it helped. Filled out an application, then waited like a month for them to reach out. HR messaged me with a link for an online test that included behavioral and IQ-like tests (numeric, verbal, abstract). Heard back a week later for a screening call scheduled two weeks out. The phone interview was mostly situational questions (STAR method), and the interviewer was nice. Two weeks after that, I had a technical interview with two developers. They seemed to not have read my resume. I was asked to talk about a project, but they interrupted a lot to ask about deployment and databases. They wanted to know if I used modern practices like CI/CD and NoSQL. Then came the coding part with two questions: finding errors in a tricky Stack implementation and solving an algorithmic problem. After coding, there were about five trivia questions on GC, HashMap vs. TreeMap, and 'how to find why the system is slow' (which they noted as a con if you lack monitoring tool experience). A week later, HR said they were moving on with other candidates, citing lack of monitoring experience and a guess that I 'don't know generics', even though they never asked about generics. The process was super slow. HR was good, and the screening call was fine if you prepared for situational questions. The technical interview was structured, but sometimes you had to guess what they were looking for. The feedback seemed based on guesswork ('it looks like', 'it seems') and didn't reflect what was actually asked in the interview.

A recruiter reached out and was super helpful. First, a quick 15-min call with the recruiter, then a longer HR chat for about 45 minutes covering my background and future goals. After that, there was an online coding test with two simple Codility tasks (10-15 mins each) and some short, diverse IT questions to check my knowledge, like what TTL is or the difference between TRUNCATE and DELETE in SQL. I didn't hear back for about a week, which made me think I hadn't passed, but surprisingly the HR responded saying it was their fault and they were excited to invite me to the final stage, the onsite interview. The onsite consists of four parts: a Culture interview focusing on past engineering cultures, growth at Spotify, agile, conflict resolution, org structure, and teamwork using real-life examples. A Coding interview where I'd write and discuss code on a whiteboard (preferably Java or Python), focusing on thought process, communication, and correctness. A Case interview where I'd diagnose and fix a backend system issue by asking questions about its state. And finally, a System Design interview about building and scaling systems, covering load balancing, availability, caching, and databases. I felt I didn't do great on the system design, and the case interview was tough but manageable with hints. The whiteboard coding was challenging despite practice.