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
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a stream of song IDs listened to by users, write a function to return the top K most played songs over a given time window.
#Heaps
#Hash Maps
#Streaming Data
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Spotify users often complain that 'random shuffle' doesn't feel random if it plays the same artist back-to-back. Design an algorithm to shuffle a playlist of songs such that songs by the same artist are spaced out as evenly as possible.
#Arrays
#Greedy
#Heaps
#Fisher-Yates
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
You are given K sorted playlists (arrays of song IDs sorted by release date). Merge them into a single sorted playlist.
#Divide and Conquer
#Heaps
#Linked Lists
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given an array of integers representing the duration of songs in a user's queue, and a target commute time, find exactly two songs that add up to the exact commute time minus 30 seconds (for a crossfade).
#Hash Maps
#Two Pointers
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Design a rate limiter for the Spotify Web API to prevent third-party applications from exceeding their quota of 10,000 requests per minute.
#Sliding Window
#Concurrency
#System Design
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a graph of artists where edges represent 'Fans also like' relationships, write a function to find the shortest degree of separation between two given artists.
#Graphs
#BFS
#Shortest Path
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Find the longest consecutive listening session from a log of user play events. Each event has a start_time and end_time. A session is continuous if the gap between songs is less than 5 seconds.
#Intervals
#Sorting
#Arrays
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Calculate the minimum number of skips required to reach a target song in a circular queue, given that the user can skip forward by 1, skip forward by 3, or go back by 1.
#Dynamic Programming
#BFS
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.