Snowflake Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Phone Screens, DAG Coding and a Control Plane Design

Two phone screens, one coding and one system design.

The coding question was a "privilege" problem that is already on the forum (the DAG allow/disallow letters one). The difference in the requirements was that each node passes down its own final state to its children, instead of passing allow and disallow separately. I propagated in topological order, and at each step every node computes its latest state. I spent 10 minutes debugging a typo, and I don't know whether that is what got me rejected. At the end I wrote a few test cases, they all passed, and I finished 5 minutes early.

I don't remember the system design round that well. I hadn't seen it on the forum, but it wasn't hard. I solved it with just a SQL db plus Kafka and finished 10 minutes early. The interviewer kept saying "looks good to me".

Update: I remembered what the SD question was. It was to design a control plane system that manages cloud clusters and also monitors the health status of the hosts.