Spotify’s Interview Process & Questions

Spotify's Interview Process for Software Engineers: 3 Steps

For a mid to senior-level software engineer, Spotify’s process (usually) looks like this:

• Recruiter call (30 minutes)
• Technical phone screen (75 minutes)
• Onsite (4 hours)

Spotify is notorious for moving slowly, so don’t be surprised if there are a couple of weeks of lull in between each of these steps.

Spotify’s interview process is a hybrid, which means that while you interview for a specific team at the outset, your interviewers won’t all be from that team. Usually, you will meet the hiring manager and one other engineer on the team. The rest of your interviewers will be from other teams. One exception to this rule is high-profile teams, in which case you may meet with 2 different engineers from that team.

Because you’re interviewing with a specific team from the outset, there is no additional matching round. However, for open-ended roles or in cases where you did well in your interviews, but the original team wasn’t a fit for whatever reason, they’ll pass you to a call with hiring managers where they sell you on joining their teams instead.

Step 1: Recruiter Call

This is a typical recruiter call, where they’ll ask about previous experience, relevant projects, and why you’re interested in Spotify. They’ll also elaborate on the role and confirm that your experience and expectations are a good match.

It’s really important, at this stage, not to reveal your salary expectations, your salary history, or where you are in the process with other companies. We wrote a detailed post about salary negotiation that lays out exactly what to say when recruiters pressure you to name the first number. Just don’t do it – when you give out information this early in the process, you’re painting future you into a corner.

Step 2: Technical Phone Screen

The exact process can vary from team to team. Generally, you’re asked technical trivia questions and some values-based questions, followed by coding.

How interviews are conducted also varies. The most frequently used tools are Coderpad, HackerRank, and in some cases, you’ll be asked to share your screen and use your IDE while you work through the problems you’re given.

Finally, you may be asked to describe a past relevant project you’ve worked on. Make sure you’re prepared to demo and/or go into detail.

Step 3: Onsite

Spotify’s onsite usually lasts 4 hours and consists of the following steps:

• Case Study (1 hour)
• Coding (1 hour)
• System design (1 hour)
• Behavioral/Values (1 hour)

The order of these rounds can vary, as well as the number of coding interviews required. Depending on your score for various portions of the onsite, you may be required to complete an extra system design, object oriented design, or algorithms interview. There may be extra rounds for certain teams and roles as well. Given that Spotify’s interview process is centralized, you generally won’t be interviewing with engineers or managers from the team you’ll end up on.

Coding

The technical interview will consist of domain-specific questions, values-based questions, and a few medium to hard difficulty LeetCode-style questions.

As with the technical phone screen, tooling is team-dependent.

System Design

For the system design interview, Spotify wants to see a broad and general understanding of the system design process, they'll also mix in domain specific questions. Generally the questions will follow the format of "Design a system that does (x)" with an opportunity for follow-up questions on scalability.

Spotify uses Mural for system design interviews.

Case Study

The most important round in Spotify’s onsite is the case study interview. In this interview, you’ll be presented with a very open-ended real-world problem that may require debugging a system to figure out what’s wrong with it or to figure out why some process has stalled.

Some system design diagrams may be shared with you, along with fake terminals, code snippets, and so on.

This interview requires lots of dialogue and critical thinking, and the expectation is that you’ll ask your interviewer a bunch of questions. Successful candidates will have a broad understanding of the software engineering process itself, as well as a broad understanding of the system design process.

Values/Behavioral

Spotify places great importance on their values and on candidates being good culture fits. Their values are as follows:

• Innovative
• Collaborative
• Passionate
• Playful
• Sincere

In this interview, you’ll get a series of behavioral questions that try to get at the following (taken verbatim from their careers site):

• Do your values align with our values?
• Do you take ownership of your work and take pride in what you deliver?
• Are you adaptable?
• Are you collaborative?
• Are you driven?

Types of Interview Questions to Expect at Spotify

Coding

This interview usually has a few medium to hard difficulty LeetCode-style questions.

To figure out what types of questions to expect in your Spotify interviews, we did two things. First, we spoke to some current and former Spotify interviewers in our community. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with Glassdoor data AND our own data-set of mock interviews. Based on all of the above, here are the types of questions you’re likely to encounter.

System Design

From what we’ve heard, Spotify’s system design interview follows the format of “Design a system (or feature) that does X” followed by a discussion about scalability, concurrency, and/or load balancing.

Common Spotify Interview Questions

Below are common questions that interviewers from Spotify ask on our platform. Since our data comes from mock interviews, questions may not be exactly the same as what you'd see in real interviews.

How Spotify Makes Hiring Decisions

At Spotify, the hiring manager has final say over who gets hired. They do have a rubric, but there is no specific score or bar that guarantees an offer, and the hiring manager has space to hire someone for potential or because they were impressed with the candidate’s communication style, even if their technical skills were borderline.

Spotify Interview Replays