Spotify Data Engineer interview experience

The vibe was surprisingly supportive and polite, and it put me at ease. The conversation started with introductions, then shifted into theory and fundamentals questions.

I remember being asked about eventual consistency and the CAP theorem, and we talked through the kinds of data formats I’d worked with—things like Avro and Parquet—plus what I understood about their differences. They also asked more general CS comparisons, like Python versus lower-level languages, and why an Iceberg table format could be beneficial. From there we went into MapReduce, and even touched on time complexity for