The screening round included a discussion about a previous project, some generic questions about software and debugging, and a code challenge. This was fairly easy.

This was followed by a values round, a case study (debugging skills) round, a coding challenge, and a system design round.

The values round was fairly standard, but the interviewer seemed to be asking questions from a script instead of actually listening and trying to determine if a reaction to a situation demonstrated a company value.

The case study (debugging skills) round consisted of debugging an outage. The aim of this round was not to resolve the outage but to demonstrate debugging skills. The scenario presented was a failure of a business-critical feature in a particular region. This is not a technically challenging round for someone with prior debugging experience. However, based on the feedback received and the interviewer's conduct, it seemed like there were hidden expectations for this round. My experience was that the interviewers also tried to put me on the spot, despite me suggesting a different approach.

The coding round was fairly easy. I was asked a question where performance optimization didn't seem to be the aim; instead, talking about edge cases and design decisions was more important. I did well and walked the interviewer through all edge cases, my thought process, and trade-offs around design. The interviewer nitpicked about certain choices, including details like the behavior of standard library APIs, which felt unnecessary since programmers nowadays don't write code before looking up documentation online. The feedback for this round suggested that the interviewer made certain assumptions about the level of my skill based on this nitpicking.

The system design round consisted of a problem statement that was an extension of an existing feature in Spotify. This round differed from FAANG system design problems in that the functional and non-functional requirements were clearly defined upfront. I provided a high-level overview, followed by another walk-through about bottlenecks. The interviewers seemed interested in discussing the trade-offs related to the design of APIs and data models, and other functional aspects of the system, more than scaling.

I don't think it's fair to reveal the questions.