The interview process consisted of:

• 1 Phone Screen with the Recruiter
• 1 Technical Screen with an Engineer (or two engineers)
• 4 onsite interviews with two data engineers per round.

I understand that Spotify usually moves slowly with their candidates due to the volume of applications and the company being on the smaller side. However, treating candidates who make it to the onsite interviews with extremely slow and unclear responses is another level of unprofessionalism.

Phone Screen with Recruiter

My recruiter joined my phone screen late by 20 minutes. The general feeling was that he was rushed and just wanted to get this over with, not even giving me time to ask questions about the process or how to best prepare. My recruiter was very slow in his responses and unclear in his answers when he did respond, which I will provide more examples of throughout this interview process.

Technical Screen with an Engineer

The actual interviews with the engineers were great. They were warm, responsive, and we had good conversations about the company. Questions related to general CS fundamentals and general Data Engineering questions related to tools like MapReduce were asked. It ended with a simple LeetCode question with a slightly harder follow-up that we just talked through.

Virtual Onsite

My onsite was scheduled for 3 weeks after my technical screen, which was not ideal for my schedule. I was hoping to wrap this up in 2 weeks maximum. There were multiple miscommunications with my recruiter, from scheduling to general questions. There was a scheduling error where he did not allocate enough interview spots, so I had to re-provide my availability. He also mentioned a 30-minute call to best prep me for the interviews, which he never got around to scheduling. I had to ask a couple of times for a study guide, and any questions I had were met with non-answers and directions to look at the study guide. This ended with a passive-aggressive sounding, "Please let me know if you have any questions." The recruiter experience was definitely abysmal, as they are the first contact with a company and how their culture is reflected to external candidates. The job description even changed mid-way from mid-level to senior, which was not good. Other than this horrible experience, the engineers on the onsite were nice. The onsite interview consisted of:

• A coding round
• A system design round
• A data round
• A behavioral round

Each round was about an hour long, with a total of 4 rounds in the final onsite.

Coding Round: A string parsing question that required counting the length of the shortest substring in a paragraph-formatted string input. It was a bit tricky but should be solvable in the time given.

Systems Design Round: They ask you to design a system around a problem that the engineers likely had to solve themselves. This is done in Miro whiteboarding software, so familiarize yourself with it if you get a design round.

Data Round: They ask about your experience in Data Engineering and some SQL/Pandas questions. Other reviews mentioned windowing functions, and they were right; you will have to utilize this for this round.

Behavioral Round: A standard behavioral round where they ask about your experience and how you dealt with specific situations. This is done with a manager of one of the teams that are hiring.

Note: Spotify (at least for my recruiter) does NOT fast-track you at all if you have a competing offer. In fact, they are not cognizant or transparent about their decision-making within a timeframe you give. I heard back about a week and a half after my onsite with a rejection. I was transparent with my recruiter the whole time and met with underwhelming responses. It felt like they were dragging their feet on getting the process done, which is not great. This could be just my experience, but if you do decide to interview with this company, I wish you good luck on getting a favorable recruiter who does their job and has empathy for candidates.

Can you explain what the CAP theorem is?