Spotify
Music streaming platform using ML for personalization and recommendation.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Hard
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
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a Product Manager or Data Scientist regarding a data engineering constraint or unrealistic deadline.
#Communication
#Stakeholder Management
#Prioritization
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where a critical data pipeline failed in production. How did you troubleshoot it, and what did you do to prevent it from happening again?
#Incident Management
#Problem Solving
#Ownership
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you optimized a process or pipeline to save costs on cloud infrastructure.
#Cost Optimization
#Cloud Computing
#Impact
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Give an example of how you mentored a junior engineer or shared knowledge across teams to improve overall engineering standards.
#Mentorship
#Collaboration
#Team Building
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to learn a completely new technology or framework on the fly to deliver a project on time.
#Adaptability
#Learning
#Agile
Data Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Python function to find the top K most frequently played songs for a given user from a list of stream logs.
#Python
#Hash Maps
#Heaps
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a list of user listening sessions with start and end timestamps, write a function to merge all overlapping sessions to calculate the total unique listening time.
#Python
#Intervals
#Sorting
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Design a sliding window algorithm to count the number of streams a track received in the last 5 minutes, updating in real-time.
#Data Structures
#Queues
#Real-time Processing
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a function to find the longest streak of consecutive days a user listened to a specific podcast.
#Python
#Arrays
#Hash Sets
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a massive JSON log file of track events that cannot fit into memory, write a Python script to filter out skipped tracks and aggregate the total play duration per artist.
#Python
#Generators
#File I/O
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement a rate limiter for a Spotify API endpoint that allows a maximum of 100 requests per minute per user.
#Token Bucket
#System Design
#Concurrency
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Given a playlist of track durations, find if there are two tracks that add up to exactly a target duration (Two Sum variant).
#Python
#Hash Maps
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement an LRU Cache to store a user's most recently played tracks.
#Linked Lists
#Hash Maps
#Object-Oriented Design
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Write a script to parse a nested JSON payload representing a user's playlist and extract all unique genres, counting their frequencies.
#Python
#JSON
#Recursion
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a dimensional data model (Star Schema) to support the backend analytics for Spotify Wrapped.
#Star Schema
#Fact Tables
#Dimension Tables
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design the end-to-end data pipeline for Spotify Wrapped. How do you process a year's worth of data for hundreds of millions of users?
#Batch Processing
#GCP
#Dataflow
#BigQuery
#Scalability
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time dashboard pipeline showing the top trending songs globally right now.
#Streaming
#Kafka
#Pub/Sub
#Apache Flink
#Redis
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
How would you migrate a massive legacy on-prem Hadoop pipeline to GCP Dataflow and BigQuery with zero downtime?
#Cloud Migration
#GCP
#Architecture
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an A/B testing data pipeline to evaluate a new home screen recommendation algorithm.
#A/B Testing
#Data Pipelines
#Analytics
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to ingest, validate, and process 10 billion daily stream events from mobile clients.
#Ingestion
#Kafka
#Data Quality
#Microservices
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a pipeline to calculate royalty payments to artists at the end of the month based on complex, varying contract rules.
#Batch Processing
#Financial Data
#Idempotency
#Airflow
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Architect a system to detect fraudulent streams (e.g., bot farms looping a 31-second track) in near real-time.
#Fraud Detection
#Streaming
#Graph Processing
#Machine Learning
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to calculate the 7-day rolling average of streams for each artist over the past month.
#Window Functions
#Aggregations
#Time Series
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
easy
Write a SQL query to find users who listened to the exact same song more than 10 times in a single calendar day.
#GROUP BY
#HAVING
#Date Functions
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Write a SQL query to identify the top 3 most skipped tracks (played for less than 30 seconds) in the last 24 hours.
#Filtering
#Sorting
#LIMIT
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Write a SQL query to calculate the Month-over-Month retention rate of Spotify Premium users.
#Self Joins
#CTEs
#Cohort Analysis
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you handle late-arriving stream events in BigQuery when calculating daily aggregations?
#BigQuery
#Data Engineering
#Event Time vs Processing Time
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Write a SQL query to find the median listening time per user without using built-in median functions.
#Window Functions
#PERCENT_RANK
#Math
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
Write a query to identify 'bouncing' users—users who started a playlist, listened to less than 10 seconds of the first track, and did not play another track within 1 hour.
#LEAD/LAG
#Window Functions
#Time Intervals
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
In a distributed join, how do you handle data skew? For example, joining a 'Streams' table with an 'Artists' table where Taylor Swift has 100x more streams than others.
#Spark
#Data Skew
#Distributed Computing
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between Apache Beam's Windowing and Triggers. Give a use case for each.
#Apache Beam
#Streaming
#GCP Dataflow
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you optimize a slow-running BigQuery query that processes terabytes of data and frequently hits resource limits?
#BigQuery
#Optimization
#Partitioning
#Clustering
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain how Kafka consumer groups work and what happens during a partition rebalance.
#Kafka
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What is the difference between a broadcast join and a shuffle join in Spark or Scio? When would you use each?
#Spark
#Scio
#Joins
#Performance
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How do you ensure data quality and idempotency in an Apache Airflow DAG?
#Airflow
#Data Quality
#Idempotency
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
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Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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