The process was quite smooth, starting with a recruiter phone call to understand my background, interests, skills, and why I want to join Spotify. It was quite laid back, and I was immediately given the green signal to proceed to the next round.

The second round was a Skype interview with a couple of engineers who tested my basic understanding of CS concepts with a range of trivia questions. Then, there was a live coding test (a simple question) which tested my basic problem-solving skills, my understanding of code complexity, and writing clean code.

After a while, I got through to the onsite interview at the Stockholm office. All expenses were paid, and the entire process was smooth. The day had a total of four interviews: one behavioural, a design interview, a case interview, and a whiteboard coding round.

Not much preparation was needed, except for a bit of understanding of how Spotify works and some design paradigms for working with huge amounts of data. One needs to think about any problem from the technical perspective and demonstrate a deeper understanding of concepts at this stage.

But the whole process was very laid back (very Swedish!), and the interviewers helped me a lot. Staying calm was the key.

The most surprising thing of all is that I got the feedback a day later that I didn't make it. The recruiter took his time to go through the feedback round by round, which helped me understand my strengths and flaws. Overall, a very good experience.