I applied in-person. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in Sept 2017
Interview
A very straightforward process. Recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn. An initial conversation for about 45 minutes about my current experience. A phone interview was then scheduled for the following week. After clearing the phone round, an onsite interview was scheduled after about 10 days.
Tips: Get the book 'Cracking the coding interview'. It will prove very helpful. Give yourself enough time to look through all coding problems in that book. Its certainly not exhaustive good prep material nonetheless.
Make sure you study a lot about system design and debugging a backend distributed system that is not performing well or is just dead. The system design interviews are very important for a backend engineer. I did the programming interviews very well but my system design was a little flat(it was the last interview of the day and I was exhausted) and according to HR, that made the difference between getting the offer or not.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Phone Interview: Asked about experience and current work.
Tech question (on collabedit): Given a small string and a larger string, write a program to fin out if the smaller string can be generated from alphabets in the larger string. Big O complexity and best/worst case analysis.
Onsite:
1) Find if left half of a binary tree is mirror image of right half.
2) Theres a text string available that represents a sentence but the spaces between words are missing. Given a dictionary of valid words, recreate sentence with spaces in the right place. (standard question from book 'Cracking the coding interview'.
3) System design question about how to design an ad-server. get and put for ad exchange and keeping track of clicks on an ad.
4) Case study. Gave me a scenario where one of their ad servers is down and users are not seeing ads, given server login access how would you debug.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify in Aug 2022
Interview
Overall I would say it was short, I think it was friendly, but the process was built as monologue, that was a bit unexpected to me. Unfortunately, I haven't received any feedback or emotions from interviewers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- asked about a recent project, some superficial questions related to it
- asked how would I find bottlenecks in apps
- asked what happens when a user presses Enter in a browser after entering url
- as the additional question was how does browser render the server response
- implemented a very basic algorithm task in the online editor, but didn't ask about Big O or anything like that, just that it works and it is ok.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify in Mar 2022
Interview
I had an Intro call with an HR representative to discuss the opportunity.
I Had a live Coding session, a one-hour call, with two Senior Software Engineers to solve an algorithm question.
I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (Boston, MA) in Aug 2019
Interview
Approached by internal recruiter
Took a week to schedule to talk to internal recruiter. Was asked high level distributed computing questions.
Scheduled for next interview conducted via Google Hangout. Directed to code share site for coding test, There were no rules set on whether interviewee could look up API doc or syntax . help. I made a number of mistakes with array syntax. My program did produce correct results for all edge cases. However, from an observer's point of view, I definitely struggled because of array syntax error. Although I answered rest of questions correctly, it was not a smooth interview. Hence, I was not moved forward to next step.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a project you have accomplished.
Remove duplicates from array of integer maintaining original order.
Explain the data structure chosen.
What's the complexity of the program.?
