Mock system design interview at Spotify
A live 45-minute round on a question reported in Spotify interviews, run by an AI interviewer that asks one thing at a time, probes what you say, looks at your whiteboard, and weighs what that round is reported to weigh. It ends with a debrief: a score, what was strong, what was missing.
Design Apache Airflow
Schedule and run twenty thousand data pipelines as dependency graphs, each run tied to a slice of time, so a failed night can be retried or a year backfilled safely.
You will not see the requirements, the numbers or the design before you start. That is the point.
What the Spotify round is reported to look like
About an hour, drawn in Mural: design a system that does one thing, then follow-ups on scale. Reported prompts include adding images to playlists, podcast search and content delivery, and loops also have a separate case study round, often finding the fault in a running system.
What it weighs
- Content delivery: CDNs, caching and load balancing for files served to listeners worldwide
- Bottlenecks found and removed as the follow-ups raise the scale
- Each decision explained, down to the components and technologies you would use
The common mistake
Stopping at the application services. Several reported prompts turn on serving files such as images or audio quickly around the world, and a candidate given a CDN prompt says basic networking was needed, so be ready to discuss caching, load balancing and where the bytes come from.
From public interview guides and candidate reports, and Spotify’s own interview guidance where it publishes any. Not endorsed by Spotify. The interviewer is an AI running in that style; it is practice, not a prediction.
Start the round
The interviewer’s opening question is free. Answering it is part of Pro. See an example round and its debrief →
The 2 questions this round draws from
Each is reported in Spotify interviews. Pick one to sit, or read its reference design and walk through a strong answer first.
- Design Apache AirflowSchedule and run twenty thousand data pipelines as dependency graphs, each run tied to a slice of time, so a failed night can be retried or a year backfilled safely.drawn
- Design SpotifyStream 100 M tracks to 600 M listeners with sound in 200 ms, offline downloads, regional licensing, and every play counted for royalties.
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