I put in my application online. In 3 days a recruiter contacted me and asked me to return a take-home data science exercise within a week. I wasn't given any notice/option to delay it, but at the same time the assignment was not one that should take that long to come up with a reasonable result, so I felt this was ok. After a week, I emailed the recruiter to check in and he confirmed that Spotify wanted to move forward. We scheduled a phone screen with one of the team members the person hired into the role would be working with. This was basically a conversation with another data scientist; if you know what you're talking about they can tell (and vice versa). That went well so we scheduled an onsite. The onsite was incredibly pleasant and fun. No games, no trick questions. Just talking to competent, smart people about what they do, and about my work. I was asked to go into details of how I would approach certain data/modeling problems, choices I've made in my projects, etc. Honestly, at several points I forgot I was on an interview, I just felt like I was talking with a coworker. HR was also very transparent and efficient throughout the whole process. The process took about a month start to finish, but for one week of that I was unavailable. I thought that everyone was really professional and overall it was a great experience.

I submitted my application and very quickly received an open-ended assignment to use a large data set. I was given a week to complete the assignment. I probably took ~30 hours to work on the project. Once finished I received word that I would have an interview (via skype) the following week. The first interview was very casual I just had to talk about my experience. Very quickly after the 1st interview was over I set up a 2nd interview. The next interview was more about how I would use data to solve problems specific to Spotify. My answers weren't perfect which was probably why I wasn't offered a position.