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Spotify interview notes, page 2 of 2

Large Enterprises

Screna has 18 Spotify interview write-ups. The most reported round is the product sense round (10).

18 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Spotify·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Spotify PM interview with a single metrics/diagnostic question about a spike in app installs. Pretty focused session, no fluff.
  • Spotify's app installs increased by 25%. Walk through how you'd figure out what caused it.

“My first instinct was to jump straight to 'good thing, ship it' which is obviously wrong.”

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Spotify·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Spotify PM interview with a product improvement question about Patreon. Short and focused, just the one question from what I can tell.
  • How would you improve Patreon?

“Threw me a bit because I expected something Spotify-adjacent.”

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Spotify·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Spotify ML engineer system design round, one big open-ended question about building a podcast recap pipeline end to end. Took the full session and then some. Pretty thorough scope, felt like they wanted to see if you'd drown or swim.
  • Design a production system that generates short podcast recaps for newly published episodes, covering ingestion, transcription, summarization, serving, and monitoring.

“This thing sprawls in every direction and I did not pace myself well.”

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Spotify·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Spotify ML Engineer interview with a pretty meaty SQL question that also branched into system design territory. The deduplication and optimization follow-ups are where it gets interesting, and where I probably could've been sharper.
  • Given a users table and a listening_events table (which may have duplicate rows due to pipeline retries), write a SQL query that returns the top 3 users by total minutes played in the last 30 days for each country, including country, user_id, total_minutes, and rank within country.
  • How would you deduplicate events in the listening_events table before aggregating, given that duplicate rows share the same event_id?
  • How would you optimize this query if the listening_events table is extremely large?
  • When would partitioning help versus sharding for a table like listening_events?

“The window function part wasn't the hard bit.”

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Spotify·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Spotify PM interview with one estimation question about active listeners. Pretty classic product sense / metrics territory, nothing wild, but it made me realize how much prep goes into making these feel natural.
  • Estimate how many people are actively listening to songs on Spotify at any given moment.

“I went with a top-down approach: global internet users, smartphone penetration, music streaming adoption, Spotify market share, then tried to figure out what fraction of users would be listening at a random point in the day.”

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Spotify·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Spotify MLE interview that was basically one big open-ended ML design question about converting free users to paid. No coding, just a deep system design conversation that covered the full ML lifecycle. Felt more like a whiteboard thesis defense than a typical interview round.
  • Design a full end-to-end ML system to predict which free-tier users are likely to convert to a paid subscription. Walk through everything from business framing to how the model outputs get used by product teams.

“This question is enormous and I think I underestimated how much they wanted me to connect each piece to the actual business.”

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Spotify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
PMM interview at Spotify focused on funnel analysis for Premium subscriptions. Pretty case-heavy from the start, no warmup.
  • Spotify's marketing team is seeing significant drop-off in the Premium subscription funnel. What metrics would you prioritize to diagnose where the problem is?

“I went top-down through the funnel stages which felt right but I think I rushed past acquisition metrics too fast and spent too long on activation.”

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Spotify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a product design role at Spotify and got a classic critique question. Short and focused, just the one question from what I remember.
  • Critique the Spotify app. What works, what doesn't, and how would you improve it?

“I use Spotify every day so I figured this would be easy.”

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