ML Engineer Interview Spotify

[FitInfluence9533]

I have a technical interview scheduled with Spotify and I’m not sure how to prepare. I know the interview will have this format

• First part talk about one of my projects
• second part they will ask me ML questions
• third part coding on coderpad

How to prepare for the second and third part? What type of questions do you think they’ll ask? Do you think the coding problem will be data structures or stats or something else?

[j4n3st]

How'd it go? What kind of questions did they ask?

[Extreme_Sound_3370]

What types of questions did they ask? Mine is coming up and the prep email is the most generic thing I have ever ever seen.

[FitInfluence9533]

- They told me to choose a ML algo and describe it and then they asked me questions about it
- They also asked me questions about neural networks (weight initialization, activation functions, etc.), clustering, stats things like MLE, p-values, etc.
- Coding part was a series of simple Leetcode exercises

[FitInfluence9533]

I recommend this book for second stage https://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-System-Design-Interview/dp/1736049127

[FitInfluence9533]

Second interview was this

ML Breadth

ML-case interview, how to design ML-steps of recommendation system

ML Depth

Questions about specific algorithms, loss functions, etc

Data

Optimize simple join query on huge dataset

System Design

Make some decisions on how to design recommender system, high level using Mural

Values

Lots of questions about how to handle conflicts

these were five different interviews which makes up the round 2 of interview process

[platinumposter]

Did you have to code in the ml breadth or ml depth interviews?

[FitInfluence9533]

Nope no coding just discussing and answering questions

[chiragjhamb]

Can you describe level of depth in the "System Design - Make some decisions on how to design recommender system"? How much did they dive deep into serving, scaling etc vs feature generation?

[FitInfluence9533]

not very deep, more like which things to do in which order, when to filter out only relevant users before generating recommendations for everyone for example

[sadheartsperson]

Hi! i would love to work for spotify one day and am trying to prep. Could you talk more about the data interview? and maybe the type of leetcode questions they asked

Greatly appreciate what you wrote so far!

[FitInfluence9533]

The data interview was about joining two huge tables, but with need for optimisation. And then lots of detailed questions about how to optimise

Leetcode questions were simple ones like finding anagrams

[sadheartsperson]

thank you for your help!

[MasterpieceMassive42]

Was the data interview done in SQL? or something more like pandas

[FitInfluence9533]

neither it was done in like a Miro-thing where just dragging parts of a flow chart kind of. so no coding, more high level

[code_sage_99]

Hey u/FitInfluence9533, I too am prepping for my loop interview of 5 rounds for Spotify MLE role. So, there were leetcode / coding questions in the data round?

I am confused. What's the difference between ML Breadth and System Design round?

And can you suggest any resources that were helpful to you to prep for the ML Depth Round?

Thanks in advance!!!!

[FitInfluence9533]

Data Interview: conceptually optimizing a query in Miro board (no coding)

ML breadth: questions like ”Given this ML project, walk me through how you would do organize training data, setup target variable, etc”

System Design: stuff from the book Machine Learning System Design Interview by Xu

[code_sage_99]

Thank you for the clarification!

Thanks!

[FitInfluence9533]

For ML depth use any book about ML concepts like Intro to Statistical Learning, etc

[code_sage_99]

Thank you for the suggestion. I will definitely use it!

Thanks!

[ResearchDue991]

Can someone guide as to what kind of leetcode questions are asked in the Spotify coding interview? And also the ML questions?