went through the Spotify SWE loop earlier this year for a backend role (mid-senior level, NYC). sharing the coding round specifics because i couldn't find good info before i went in.
the OA came first, through HackerRank. two problems, 90 minutes. both were algorithmic but not grind-hard. the first was a medium-tier graph traversal problem, the kind where you're mapping dependencies. the second was more data manipulation with some string parsing. nothing i'd call 'hard' on leetcode, but you need to be clean and efficient, not just correct. they auto-judge your solution, so edge cases matter.
after the OA: the technical phone screen
one interviewer, 45 minutes, one coding problem shared in a collaborative doc (not CoderPad, just a Google doc). that surprised me. no syntax highlighting. the problem itself was more of a design-meets-coding hybrid: given a stream of data, implement a structure that does X efficiently. they wanted to talk through the approach before i started typing.
leveling note: the senior SWE bar felt like it was at about L5 equivalent by big-tech standards. you don't need to be grinding leetcode hards, but you should be fluent at mediums and comfortable reasoning about time/space complexity out loud.
what actually mattered
the communication ratio was probably 60/40 talking to coding. they care that you explain your thinking before you commit to an approach. i changed direction once mid-problem and the interviewer seemed genuinely interested in WHY, not annoyed.
one thing i wish someone had told me: Spotify's backend runs a lot of event-driven architecture (Kafka, basically everywhere). if you drop a casual mention that you understand pub-sub patterns and why you'd use them, it lands well. not required, just noticed.
timeline was about 2 weeks OA to phone screen. felt pretty organized compared to some places i've interviewed.