I was interviewing remotely for an EMEA remote job at Spotify in the summer of 2021. I was contacted by a recruiter and started the process.

The first step was a call with the recruiter, covering my background, experience, and a discussion about the entire interview process.

The second interview was 75 minutes long and involved two data engineers. The questions spanned every aspect of engineering, including data structures, a coding task, and data engineering questions, specifically MapReduce.

The third step consisted of four one-hour interviews in a single day, plus a half-hour chat with two Spotify employees. These included interviews on data, algorithms, values, and system design. As my recruiter emphasized, and I will echo here: the values interview is super important. Spotify strives to ensure they include people who share their qualities, values, and beliefs.

The algorithm interview was a coding session on pre-written code with data engineering elements. The system design interview was a very interesting discussion about an ETL pipeline of your choice and how you would approach building something from scratch.

The data interview was a case study of an actual incident that had occurred at Spotify.

Questions about Hadoop, MapReduce, hash trees, complexities, and use cases of several data structures.

MapReduce task of selecting top N played tracks if you have userId, trackId, etc.