I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Spotify (London, England) in May 2025
Interview
Tech Screen with basic ML + coding stuff, then 4 rounds of various ML Breadth + Depth, System Design and Data Engineering; For ML rounds there were basic ML questions and very SWE Design and Data Engineering (not typical ML System Design)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design the backend, given black box recommender system
2. Describe K Means, Transformer, Difference between LSTM and GRU
I applied online. I interviewed at Spotify in May 2021
Interview
Started with the usual screen with a recruiter. Next round was with the HM for the position. After these there was a technical screen that involved video interview with two other Senior MLEs. After confirming with the recruiter twice on what would be included in this interview I was assured it would be DS + algs coding. That was not the case, it was 75% trivia / deep diving into technical questions, probability and ML + DL theory and one coding question - so I was pretty surprised when they dropped that in the interview. The interview went from bad to worse, interviewers were not personable, it seemed like both of them felt the need to try and catch me out on anything they could and make a lesson out of it, which was a huge red flag and made things really awkward (PhD interviewers trying to flex on prospective candidates - have some humility). In saying that, the questions were not too difficult at all, reading over some notes prior would have made all the difference, but sometimes your fate is in the hands of your recruiter.
