Spotify DevOps / SRE Interview Questions

1.Describe a time you helped a struggling engineer or team improve their on-call practices or reliability skills. What was your approach and what happened?

2.Tell me about a time you had to make a call about service architecture or infrastructure without clear guidance from your engineering manager. What was the situation and how did you decide?

3.Tell me about the last production incident you owned end-to-end without waiting for management approval to take action. What was broken and what decisions did you make?

4.Walk me through a recent decision where monitoring data suggested one action but your gut instinct said something different. How did you navigate that tension?

5.Tell me about a time you changed how your team handles incidents, deploys, or on-call rotations. What wasn't working and how did you drive the change?

6.Describe the last time you saw someone on your team struggling with operational complexity and helped them build better mental models rather than just fixing it for them. What was your approach?

7.You're on-call when our music recommendation API starts returning 500s for 20% of requests. The service is healthy in all metrics but users are tweeting they can't get their Daily Mix. How do you triage this?

8.You're implementing a new observability solution for tracking user journey performance from search to play across Spotify's mobile and web apps. What metrics would you capture and how would you architect the collection system?

9.Our Kafka clusters are seeing message lag spike to 2 hours during peak listening times. This affects real-time features like collaborative playlists and listening activity. Walk me through your investigation approach.

10.Write a script that monitors BigQuery job completion times and automatically scales Kubernetes pods for our data pipeline when jobs consistently exceed SLA. Assume you have access to BigQuery and Kubernetes APIs.

11.You notice that our Backstage developer portal is taking 45 seconds to load the service catalog for some squads. The portal serves 2000+ engineers across all tribes. How would you debug and fix this performance issue?

12.Design a deployment strategy for rolling out a critical security patch to 500+ microservices across all squads without disrupting Spotify's real-time features like collaborative playlists and live podcast streaming.

13.Design the deployment pipeline for Spotify for Artists dashboard updates. Artists check their streaming analytics multiple times daily, and any downtime directly impacts creator income tracking. How would you ensure zero-downtime deployments?

14.Design an auto-scaling system for Spotify Ad Studio's campaign creation workflows. Advertising spend peaks unpredictably around events like Black Friday, and slow campaign creation directly costs revenue. How would you handle traffic spikes?

15.You're building a new metrics collection system for all Spotify squads to track their service health in Backstage. Each squad owns 5-10 microservices, and we have 200+ squads. How would you design the ingestion and storage architecture?

16.Design a caching layer for Spotify's personalized playlists like Daily Mix and Discover Weekly. These playlists are generated by ML models and need to feel fresh while handling 100M+ playlist requests daily. What's your caching strategy?

17.Design the infrastructure for Spotify Wrapped's annual data processing. We need to analyze 600 million users' listening history from the past year and generate personalized insights in a 48-hour window. How would you architect this batch processing system?

18.Design a real-time feature flag evaluation service that every Spotify request hits. It needs to handle 10M+ requests per second and remain available even when the feature flag configuration storage is completely down. What's your architecture?

19.Tell me about a time you convinced another squad to change how they handle deployments or incidents when it impacted your services. How did you approach that conversation?

20.Describe a time you experimented with a new tool or approach for monitoring or reliability without waiting for official approval. What drove that decision?

21.You notice a chapter member from another tribe is struggling with their on-call rotation design and asks for advice. How do you balance helping them while respecting their squad's autonomy?

22.Tell me about a time you had to gather input from multiple squads to make an infrastructure decision that would affect them. How did you balance different perspectives and timelines?

23.Walk me through a time you identified a systemic reliability issue affecting multiple services but had to convince engineering leadership to prioritize the fix over feature development. What was your approach?

24.Describe a situation where you had to lead incident response across multiple squads when the root cause wasn't clear and different teams had conflicting theories. How did you coordinate the response?

25.Our mobile apps are crashing 5% more than last month, but our app performance dashboards show normal metrics. Users are posting about it on social media. How would you investigate this blind spot in our monitoring?

26.Estimate how many additional servers Spotify would need if every user started downloading their entire library for offline listening simultaneously. Walk me through your calculation.

27.You're analyzing why our podcast recommendation engine's click-through rate dropped 15% over two weeks, but podcast listening hours actually increased. What hypotheses would you test first?

28.Design a system to automatically detect when any squad's microservice is experiencing performance degradation before users notice, considering that we have 500+ services with different performance characteristics.

29.Calculate the financial impact if our music search latency increased from 200ms to 500ms. Consider how this affects user behavior and business metrics across our entire platform.

30.You need to migrate all squad data pipelines from our current batch processing system to a new real-time streaming architecture. Each squad owns their pipelines but the migration affects everyone. How do you coordinate this across 200+ autonomous teams?