Software Engineer interview
at Spotify.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 Tell me about a project you are most proud of and the autonomous technical decisions you made on it.
2. 02 Describe a time you took ownership of a production incident and drove it to resolution under time pressure.
3. 03 Walk me through a disagreement with a teammate over an architecture choice and how your squad reached alignment.
4. 04 Give an example of when your bias for action helped you unblock a stalled piece of work.

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 Given a stream of song play events, design a function to return the top K most-played tracks in a sliding time window.
2. 02 How would you architect a new feature that lets users upload custom cover images to their playlists?
3. 03 Implement an LRU cache and explain how you would adapt it to cache recently played tracks on the client.
4. 04 Walk me through how you would build a rate limiter for an API that handles millions of playback requests per minute.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design the playback service that streams audio to millions of devices simultaneously using a CDN and signed URLs.
2. 02 Design the offline listening feature, including how encrypted tracks are downloaded, cached, and synced when the device reconnects.
3. 03 Design Spotify's playlist service supporting real-time collaborative editing across multiple users.
4. 04 Design a system to ingest and process billions of daily playback events for downstream analytics and recommendations.