First stage: Internal Recruiter.

This stage involved questions about past projects and experiences, reasons for wanting to work at Spotify, most significant career contributions, current project contributions, high-level technical questions about a product and tech stack, soft skills, and experience with mentoring. It was a positive experience, but should not be underestimated.

Second stage: 1.5-hour technical interview with 2 Senior Engineers.

1. Again, questions focused on my position, career development, and current project. There were very technical questions about what I would change or improve in my project, suggested tech stacks and justifications, and resource improvements. Additionally, there were questions about Spring/Spring Boot, memory and caches, and databases. Please highlight your role and responsibility, as this was apparently a point of concern, even though I had much to say.
2. A technical exercise involved removing duplicate characters from a string with a given number of allowed duplicates. The task required thinking about the problem, asking questions, coding aloud, and manual testing. Some follow-up questions included whether I would approach the task the same way in a standard workday. The code compiled and worked, as I copied and pasted it.
3. Random questions covered differences between UDP/TCP, database indexes, man-in-the-middle attacks, threads, event stream programming (as my current role seems to involve this), Spring annotations, and comparisons between REST, SOAP, and Thrift.

Feedback: I did not pass this stage. When I asked for feedback, I received very little. The recruiter mentioned they preferred someone more expert but clarified that I hadn't done anything wrong or noteworthy. The only specific point raised was my less-than-clear exposition of my current role and responsibilities, which I found surprising given the detail I provided. For this reason, I would not recommend Spotify for interviews.

Tech exercise around removing duplicates from a string with a given number of allowed duplicates.

UDP/TCP differences. Indexes in DB and query date range. Man-in-the-middle attack thread in Java. Deadlock vs. starvation. Event stream programming: pros and cons. REST vs. SOAP vs. Thrift.