Design Spotify wrapped
PremiumData pipelineEasy
- Batch processing
- Spark
- Incremental rollups
Quick answer
This data pipeline interview question asks you to design Spotify wrapped. Aim for a design that moves data from sources to consumers reliably and on time, then explain ingestion, processing, storage and trade-offs. Interviewers want to see how you handle volume, late or bad data and failures along the way.
The problem
Design Spotify Wrapped: a yearly recap that shows each listener their top artists, top songs, minutes listened and top genre, plus how they rank among an artist's listeners, for 400 million users and about 3 trillion plays. The hard parts are the size of the batch job, a fixed launch date and the launch-day spike.
The recap is a set of story cards in the app, released to everyone on the same morning in early December. Most users read it once, but they check the numbers, so the numbers must be right.
What must the system do?
- Top lists: Each user's top 5 artists, top 5 songs and top genre for the year.
- Minutes: Total minutes listened in the year.
How well must it do it?
- Deadline: Data covers 1 January to 31 October; results must be computed, checked and loaded by 25 November.
- Launch load: The recap API holds p99 under 200 ms through the first-hour spike.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- Batch processing
- Spark
- Incremental rollups
- Percentile ranking
- Data skew
- Precomputation
How you’ll practise
- Requirements
- Data volume
- Ingestion
- Storage and processing
- Serving and freshness
- Wrap-up
Lala, personalized to you, gives a hint when you ask and reviews your design when you are ready.
What do interviewers look for?
In any data pipeline design round.
- Clarifies sources, consumers and freshness needs
- Chooses batch, streaming or both with reasons
- Handles late, duplicate and malformed records
- Makes each stage safe to retry
- Explains storage formats and partitioning
- Plans monitoring, backfills and data quality checks
Questions people ask about this interview question
- Which design type is this question?
- It is a data pipeline question. You design Spotify wrapped and explain your choices the way you would in an interview.
- Is this question asked at entry level?
- It is marked Easy, so it suits engineers who are new to data pipeline interviews. It is also a good warm-up before harder questions.
- What should I cover first?
- Start with the data sources, the consumers and how fresh the data must be. Agree on scope with the interviewer before you design anything.
- Can I practise it for free?
- It is a premium question. Sign up and unlock it once for 10 credits; it then stays unlocked. When you finish, Lala, your personalized AI mentor, can review your design for 30 credits.
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Updated · Written by the SevyDevy team