SDE at Spotify

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Round by round

1. 1

   Phone Screening20 min

   I was initially contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn who set up a phone call to discuss my background and the role at Spotify.The recruiter focused on understanding my experience, interest in the role. About my previous roles, what technologies I had worked with. A brief discussion about my current compensation and expectations.

2. 2

   Technical Phone60 min

   I was asked to solve a coding problem live with the interviewer. Question 1: Maximum Depth of Binary Tree Problem: Given a binary tree, find its maximum depth. I implemented a depth-first search (DFS) to traverse the tree and calculate the depth at each node, returning the maximum depth at the end. Question 2: Walls and Gates Problem: You are given a 2D grid representing rooms. Each room is either a wall (represented by -1), a gate (represented by 0), or an empty room (represented by INF). The goal is to fill each empty room with the distance to its nearest gate. I used Breadth-First Search (BFS) to start from all gates and propagate the minimum distance to the surrounding rooms.

   • Maximum Depth of Binary Tree
   • Walls and Gates
3. 3

   Last Round180 min

   1.Case Study (30-45 min) In this segment, I was given a real-world problem to solve. The goal was to identify the root cause of a system failure and suggest improvements. I was provided with logs, system performance data, and a few potential areas where things could have gone wrong. I was expected to: Troubleshoot the issue systematically. Prioritize potential causes. Present a solution, including how I would fix the issue and avoid it in the future.

   2.Coding (1 hour) The interviewer asked me to solve a DSA - style problem related to linked lists.

   3.System Design (1 hour) In this segment, I was asked to design a system for one of Spotify’s core features, such as music recommendations. I was tasked with designing the architecture, handling scalability issues, and considering data flow between services. Question: Design a system that can handle music recommendation requests at a global scale. Consider things like real-time processing, data storage, and how to scale as the user base grows. I discussed microservices, caching, and the use of technologies like Kafka for streaming data. We also discussed load balancing, fault tolerance, and database choices.

   4.Behavioral Questions(30-40min)

   • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a colleague. How did you handle it?
   • Describe a project where you led the team and had to make a tough decision. How did you approach it?
   • What do you think is the most important value to uphold in a workplace? And a few others that I also do not recall.

What came up