The screening round had a discussion about a previous project, some generic questions about software and debugging and a code challenge. This was fairly easy. This was followed by a values round, case study(debugging skills) round, coding challenge and a system design round. The values round was fairly standard but the interviewer seemed to be asking questions from a script instead of actually listening and trying to figure out if a reaction to a situation demonstrates a company value. The case study(debugging skills) round consists of a debugging an outage. The aim of this round is not to resolve the outage but to demonstrate debugging skills. The scenario presented was a failure of a business critical feature in a particular region. This is not a technically challenging round for someone who has prior experience for debugging. But from the feedback received and the interviewers conduct it seemed like there are hidden expectations for this round. My experience was that the interviewers also try to put me in a spot despite me suggesting a different approach. The coding round is fairly easy. I was asked a question where performance optimization didn't seem to be the aim but talking about edge cases and design decisions were more important. I did well and walked the interviewer through all edge cases and my thought process and trade-offs around design. The interviewer would nitpick about certain choices including details like behaviour of standard library APIs which felt was unnecessary since nowadays programmers don't write code before looking up documentation online. The feedback for this round suggested that the interviewer made certain assumptions about the level of my skill based on this nitpicking. The system design round consisted of a problem statement that was an extension of an existing feature in Spotify. This round was different from the FAANG system design problems in that the functional requirements and non functional requirements were clearly defined upfront. I did a high level overview followed by a another walk-through about bottlenecks. The interviewers seemed interested in talking about the tradeoffs about the design of APIs and data models and other functional aspects of the system more than scaling.