I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (Stockholm, Stockholm) in Jul 2016
Interview
Interview process:
Brief hangouts interview with HR.
Longer hangouts interview with two engineers going through some small coding problems and an extensive trivia with quick answer questions.
Invited for full day on premise with four interviews and a lunch with potential co-workers.
Consisted of four interviews (1hr each):
Culture interview with two team leads who has teams which require someone with your CV.
Coding interview with a coding challenge that gets progressively harder as you come up with solutions. Should also talk about time complexity for your algorithm and testability.
Case interview where the interviewer has data from a real case. You roleplay as an on call engineer who has been woken up in the middle of a night with a tough problem. What do you do?
Architectural interview about designing a system with certain requirements (response time, queries per second etc) and discussing your solution.
Day after the on premise they came back with results.
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England)
Interview
I had an intital interview, but I knew I would fail, The recruiter seemed disinterested and moody like tired. I got asked the typical questions like salary and stuff, but I knew I was going to fail the interview due to the above.
I think if I had a different more professional interviewer I would have passed.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England) in Apr 2025
Interview
I had 3 rounds:
1. Phone screening with hiring manager: my background, feedback culture. Fairly standard.
2. Technical screening with 2 engineers: tell in depth about one of my recent projects, general technical questions (TCP/UPD, DNS, etc). One easy LeetCode problem.
3. 4 interviews on last stage: values, algo & ds, system design, case study.
Values - normal set of values/behavioral questions that should be answered with STAR.
Algo & DS - 1 medium LeetCode problem.
System Design - basic system design task, not complex system.
Case study - debug previously occurred production incident.
Interview process was good, hiring manager kept me updated during whole process and helped a lot. Interviewers were great and friendly, I did not feel like it was "gotcha" type of interviews, but rather they genuinely tried to know more about me.
My advice: clearly explain and speak aloud your thought process on technical interviews, and prepare STAR format answers for most commonly asked values questions in advance and memorize your answers.
1 phone screen, and onsite 1 technical, 1 system design, behavioral, and case study. All leetcode style. Traditional. They are very slow however. They will compare you with other candidates and get all the feedback at once. It's an employers market most definitely.
