Spotify

Music streaming platform using ML for personalization and recommendation.

4 Rounds ~21 Days Hard

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The Interview Loop

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.

Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)

Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.

Interview Question Bank

All Roles Backend Engineer 8 Data Engineer 6 Data Scientist 4 Frontend Engineer 5 Full Stack Engineer 9 Machine Learning Engineer 7 Software Engineer 8

All Topics System Design 10 Algorithms 8 Culture Fit 5 Leadership 3 Architecture 2 Data Structures 2 SQL 2 Observability 1

Backend Engineer • Coding • medium

Given a stream of song IDs played by users, write a function to return the top K most frequently played songs in the last 24 hours.

#Heap #Hash Map #Sliding Window

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • hard

You are given K sorted playlists, where each playlist is a list of song objects sorted by release date. Merge all playlists into one single sorted playlist.

#Divide and Conquer #Heap #Linked List

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • medium

Write an algorithm to simulate Spotify's 'Shuffle' feature. Given a playlist of N songs, ensure that every song has an equal probability of being chosen, and no song is played twice until all have been played.

#Array #Math #Randomization

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • medium

Find the shortest path between two artists based on their collaborations. You are given an API that returns a list of collaborated artists for a given artist ID.

#Graph #BFS #API Integration

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • medium

Implement a rate limiter for the Spotify Web API. The rate limiter should allow a maximum of 100 requests per minute per user ID.

#Concurrency #Design #Queue

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • medium

Given a user's listening history as a string of song genres, find the length of the longest contiguous listening session that contains at most two distinct genres.

#Sliding Window #Hash Map #String

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • hard

Spotify users can organize playlists into folders. Given a nested folder structure, serialize it into a string and deserialize it back into the original structure.

#Tree #DFS #Serialization

Practice

Backend Engineer • Coding • easy

Given an array of song durations, find two songs that add up to exactly the length of a given commute time minus 30 seconds (for a crossfade).

#Array #Hash Map #Two Pointers

Practice

Difficulty Radar

Based on recent AI-sourced data.

Meet Your Interviewers

The "Standard" Interviewer

Senior Engineer

Focuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.

Simulate

Unwritten Rules

Think Out Loud

Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.

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