Snowflake Software Engineer Interview Experience
Snowflake · Senior
Interview process
It was a very typical FAANG interview style. The coding questions are all very leet-code, so it's easy to practice. The design question was unique; I hadn't heard of it before. Not that not all engineers use a question from the internal question bank, but generally speaking it's fine.
For system design, be sure to bank-of-envelope to justify why something needs to be a distributed system. Your approach might be overkill / underkill without doing this initial analysis, and you might come off as "just regurgitation sys-design interview formula"
Interview rounds · 2
- 1
Technical round
CodingSystem DesignProject Discussion- Q1. Check if binary tree is balanced
- Q2. Design a distributed leaderboard that lets millions of players view their score and the scores of the N players ranked immediately above and below them after each game.
- 2
Final / onsite round
Behavioral- Q1. Technical presentation of a project I worked on.
- Q2. What makes an engineer "Senior"?
Tips from the candidate
For technical interviews, sometimes there's some trick or curveball. Definitely verbalize your rough solution idea so they can steer you to the right idea. Don't start proposing a solution until you have some indication that you're understanding the question/prompt.
Company culture
The behavioural was very warm. I liked the manager. The project presentation sucks. They didn't have good questions which probed my depth of work. Just high-level questions.