Spotify Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3+ months. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England (UK)) in October 2018.

Interview

It was a multistep process with a strong emphasis on culture fit including an online screen (test), recruiter screen, phone screen, 6 hours onsite. There was less focus on skills and more focus on culture, approach and leadership.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in May 2013.

Interview

A Talent Acquisition rep reached out to me via LinkedIn, indicating that they wanted to talk to me about a Javascript Engineer position. I responded (via LinkedIn) that I was interested in the position. After not hearing back for over a week I contacted the rep directly (their email address was listed publicly).

The rep responded within minutes to let me know that she didn't handle the Javascript Engineer position and that she would pass my resume off to the correct person. I was included on the hand-off / handshake email. The new rep responded almost immediately and requested that I re-send my resume (even though the hand-off email included all of my LinkedIn details and a copy of my resume).

After some back-and-forth to confirm that the phone number listed on my resume (the same number that appeared in the signature of all of my emails) was the best number to reach me, we scheduled a phone call for later in the week. The phone call was simply to confirm that I was interested in the previously-discussed Javascript Engineer position and that I was capable of writing "non-jQuery" Javascript. With those points established we scheduled a second phone call with an engineer for the following week.

When the engineer called, he hadn't seen my resume and knew nothing about me other than my name and that he was to quiz me on all things Javascript. The first few questions were straight-forward; "what's the difference between 'var x = 0' and 'x = 0'". Subsequent questions were vague and covered some broad topics, "describe closures", "describe a couple design patterns", etc.

After the quiz we talked about the range of products & tools teams worked on as well as the way Spotify constructs its teams. Because the engineer knew nothing about me or which position I was interviewing for, he couldn't provide any detail about the team or product I'd be working on.

Why was I contacted by someone about a position they had no control over? Why did I have to wait 3 days to have a 5 minute phone call just to verify that I was applying for the position they had contacted me about? Why hadn't the interviewing engineer been given a copy of my resume and been told which position I was interviewing for? While everyone I spoke to was friendly, there was a general air of disinterest. The entire process felt muddled and impersonal which is unfortunate, considering that the process was started when the company reached out to me.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in September 2011.

Interview

Very disorganized. I interviewed for a software engineer position in 2011, meeting with a bunch of people, half of whom thought I was going for a data scientist position. Everyone at this stage was very friendly. This was followed by a Skype meeting with one of the VPs from Stockholm - at this point the Spotify recruiter said I should expect an offer within the next couple of days.

Despite attempts to follow-up, two weeks go by and no response. Just as I was about to give up on the position, they get back to me and tell me that the VP flew into the US and wants to meet with me in person. We arrange that. 15 minutes before the scheduled time, after I had driven an hour to NYC and while I was waiting outside their office, I get an email that says the position has been filled and the interview has been cancelled. Maybe it was an honest mistake, but I came out of it with a pretty poor impression of the company's hiring process.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Spotify (San Francisco, CA) in April 2013.

Interview

I had an initial phone screen with an HR person. It was a basic screen, but then she asked me some technical questions about objective c. That when OK and I had another phone screen with the hiring manager. The questions he asked were very text book and not really problem solving ones. So I didn't really know some of them because I hadn't cracked a cs text book in a while. So I was pretty unsure about the next step. But I waited for the recruiter to call me back and she never did.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in October 2013.

Interview

Responded within 24 hours after I submitted the application. Really interesting job requirements. Went through two phone interviews, basic knowledge questions and not hard coding problems. Went on-site for interviews about two weeks after the last phone interview. Everything feels good, the company is clearly a more than awesome place to work in, though I myself is to blame to code some really dirty in one of the coding interviews. That can be the major reason I am rejected.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (San Francisco, CA).

Interview

The day after showing initial interest in working at Spotify, I was contacted by HR. A week later, I went in for lunch, an architectural interview with some members of the team, followed by informal coffee interview afterwards. I was also giving a take-home project to work on, and a week to complete it. A few days after going in to their office, I chatted on Skype with the director of engineering to answer any lingering questions I had. A couple days after submitting the take-home project, I received an offer.

Interview Questions

Negotiation

Yes - I was given an initial offer, and asked for about 15% more. They counter-offered of about 1/2 that, plus a signing bonus. It was very friendly and quick (1 day turn-around).

Application

I applied through other source. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in December 2012.

Interview

I initially had to create an HTML5/JS webapp using the Spotify Metadata Web API. Once this effort was deemed worthy I had a phone screen to go over my solution. The phone screen went well and I was invited to the office to interview for four hours in the following topics:
1) Overall development pattern discussion (pub/sub, MVC, etc) with some basic JS problems
2) Culture fit over 1:1 lunch
3) System design (build an app, what technologies would you use, how would you setup your database schema, etc)
4) Another review of my initial programming challenge with some algorithm-focused questions

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2+ weeks. I interviewed at Spotify in January 2013.

Interview

Phone interview and onsite.

1) 1 round phone interview covers all the basics of computer science i.e, OS, synchronization, networking, distributed systems, software engineering process. Then there were 2 simple coding questions on shared editor.

After this they said there will be an onsite. Recruiter called me to check about my salary details. When I told my salary, bonus, equity per annum which is like 105k + 10k + 7k recruiter remained silent. He then said he will get back to me about the schedule for the onsite. Since they did not want to proceed because of salary they for formality arranged a 2nd phone round interview. Obviously it was not technical interview and they just said they won't proceed after that.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY).

Interview

I was contacted by Spotify about potential opportunities. There was an initial recruiter phone screen followed by a 60 minute Round1 interview conducted over Google Hangout with shared documents.

From the start the scheduling of phone screen was problematic. I would suggest a couple days+times later in the week and would get no response until the following week, asking for new times. I'd reply and then once again not hear back. This back and forth and long delays went on for 1 month. When it happened, the phone screen was routine and non-technical, just standard goals, request for current salary, etc. I generally don't like salary sharing this early but they claim they want to be sure we're in the same ballpark, which is fair-- so I gave a wider range.

The Google Hangout technical interview was scheduled and the first time I was never contacted at the date+time by the interviewer. We rescheduled with the recruiter for a couple days later, and it happened on time. The interview was a technical discussion of CS fundamentals and common knowledge questions about the discipline I focus on. There was a couple routine programming questions on the shared document, mostly along the lines of: write a function that does ___. It wasn't all that hard. It concluded that they would be in touch in a few days with feedback.

After this I never heard back from them, and was so worn out by the process I didn't bother to follow up. It took over 6 weeks to reach that point and still fell apart.

Interesting company but poor communication in the recruitment pipeline, and didn't get the sense of any urgency in hiring or value of individual candidates. Perhaps they have a big pipeline and let people fall through the cracks since they can.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks. I interviewed at Spotify in March 2016.

Interview

An awkward experience.

Everything started as usual, short phone interview with hr which I actually enjoyed because the guy was really friendly. Than he scheduled a phone interview with their engineer shortly. On phone tech interview we had a nice talk with a little bit of coding at the end, nothing special. Than I was contacted by my hr and he told me that I've passed and asked about the dates when I can fly to NY.

Now the awkward part, shortly after that I've been contacted by another hr who said that she discussed me with my initial hr. She asked for another phone interview, on which I thought we would be discussing onsite travel and availability dates, but instead she started to go through the same questions I've been asked on the very first call and at the end she proposed to schedule another tech phone interview.

After the second phone interview I got rejection letter, bottom line, don't be happy too early.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Spotify (New York, NY) in January 2015.

Interview

I applied online just to get a glance at what the interview process at Spotify looks like. I had a phone screen with a recruiter. It was a quick call and got a very good impression. I just decided to not continue in the process since it was only a test.

Interview Questions