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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Smartsheet
Smartsheet Software Engineer interview where a coding round turned into system design
My Smartsheet process felt unclear in both the way it was explained and the way it actually ran. The recruiter screen went well, and I was told to expect an easy progression into a coding screen. Instead, the round described as a one-hour coding interview turned into system design. The same mismatch continued at the onsite. I had a behavioral round, several hours of coding, and some trivial quest…
Interview experiences · Smartsheet
Smartsheet Software Engineer interview with four rounds and no follow-up
The process started with some hope and turned into a long stretch of frustration. I completed four interview rounds and was even told that an offer would be released. After that, everything stalled. They said they were waiting for other roles to be onboarded together, and the process kept dragging on. Eventually, they stopped responding altogether. I received no updates or feedback, and they didn…
Interview experiences · Smartsheet
Smartsheet Software Engineer interview with next-day rejection
I had a pretty typical early sequence: an HR screener followed by a technical interview. In the technical round, I solved everything the interviewer asked me to solve. The next day, I was rejected, which caught me off guard. From the explanation afterward, it sounded like there were many highly qualified candidates, and my performance alone wasn't the deciding factor. That made the whole thing fe…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snap Software Engineer Interview Experience — Five-Round Virtual Onsite, Auto-Rejected With No Reason
Sharing my feedback report for Snap from earlier this year. The virtual onsite had 5 rounds total — two coding, two system design, and one Q&A round where I could ask anything. The Q&A round interviewer told me that if I passed at least 3 of the previous 4 rounds, I'd move on to the discussion stage; with only 2 passes, I'd most likely be rejected. I felt like I did decently, but in the end I got…
Interview experiences · Snap
Snap Software Engineer interview: snapfest coding day with supportive interviewers
After the recruiter process, I went to a concentrated coding day called snapfest. It consisted of two back-to-back rounds, each about an hour, so it felt like one block of interviews rather than separate stages over several days. Both rounds used LeetCode-style medium problems. The interviewer tone stood out. The engineers were not cold or combative. When I got stuck, they offered guidance and ke…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snap Technical Program Manager Interview Experience — Seven Rounds Over Two Months, No Offer
Sharing my Snap TPM interview from a while back. Round 1 with the HM: A quick 30-minute chat with the hiring manager, mainly talking through two projects I'd worked on before and digging into the details. They also gave me a heads-up on what to focus on in each of the following rounds. Round 2, with the HM again: This round was more free-form — the HM asked a wide range of questions covering stat…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Data Scientist Interview Experience — Four Onsite Rounds, Treated as Practice
Overall the interview went fairly smoothly. Four rounds total. The first round on stats was a bit shaky — if I were going to fail, that's where it'd happen. But it doesn't really matter much, I'd already accepted an offer from a good company elsewhere, so this one was purely for the experience. Round 1 - Stats: They asked a few BQ questions, had me do a self-introduction, then gave an ML case — h…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Data Scientist Interview Experience — Unexpected Regression Questions and Camera-Event SQL
The recruiter told me that the technical screen would cover only SQL and statistics and probability. I could not find any new interview reports from this year on the forum. Reports from previous years covered dice probabilities, SQL-finding questions, and similar topics. The questions I actually received were completely different from what I had prepared, so I failed... I am sharing them to help…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — A 60-Minute Split Between ML and Coding
The phone call was divided into three time blocks. During the first 15 minutes, I gave my introduction and answered behavioral questions. The middle 15 minutes covered machine learning fundamentals. We discussed how to address overfitting, how to address class imbalance, the basics of optimizers, and model evaluation metrics together with their definitions. I was also asked to give a brief introd…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — ML Fundamentals, Transformers, and a Botched Course Schedule
The overall process was a standard technical phone screen: they first asked some ML fundamentals and project-related concepts, then asked about transformers, and finished with an algorithm question. Overall I felt the interviewer cared a lot about how solid your fundamentals are, especially ML concepts and coding correctness. The first part was ML fundamentals, mainly about overfitting and how to…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Model Deep Dives and Organization-Chart Coding
The author describes Snapchat onsite sessions divided between a short values-and-project discussion and approximately 50 minutes on the round’s technical subject. Values questions emphasized AI applications, prioritization, and empathy. The machine-learning discussion examined project decisions and training problems, including normalization, regularization, loss functions, and different predictio…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Two Rounds on Video Retrieval and CLIP, Then Silence
I just finished two rounds of interviews this week, applying machine learning to design a short-video recommendation system. The first round covered how to design a query retrieval system, assuming only 20% of the short videos have text descriptions. They specifically asked how CLIP works, what loss functions are used in contrastive learning, what the drawbacks of embedding-based methods are, whe…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — LRU Cache and Thread Safety
Here is my Snap senior phone screen. It started immediately with behavioral questions. It looks like I still need to keep a few short stories ready in my regular preparation, since I have heard that the quality of the behavioral answers carries weight in the evaluation. The coding question was the classic LRU Cache problem. I had to be careful with the boundary cases while implementing it. The fo…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Software Engineer Interview Experience — Failed on the Onsite's Third Round
I interviewed here earlier this year. Snap didn't seem to have any exact LeetCode-original questions, so I'm writing this mostly from memory. Round 1: You're given a list of timestamp events (unordered, can repeat), something like [12:00:01, 01:02:02, 03:03:03]. Implement a query function: given a start time and end time, compute how many events fall in that window. For example, [01:02:01, 01:02:…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Software Engineer Interview Experience — Implementing sin(x) by Hand on the Phone Screen
Phone interview with Snapchat. The interviewer was pretty good to talk to — the whole process went well, he gave hints promptly, and he was pretty chatty. I did so-so, I feel like I still need more practice, I stumbled a bit. It started with a self-introduction, then a behavioral question about how to make decisions when the information you have is limited — not hard if you prepare well. The tech…
Interview experiences · Snapchat
Snapchat Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Bugs, No Time, and a Rejection
The phone-screen question was LeetCode 947. I implemented it using breadth-first search. Near the end, my code still had two bugs. I found one of them myself, while the interviewer pointed out the other one. After that, I ran the test cases. By the time the tests were finished, there was no time left in the interview. I do not know whether the interviewer had prepared a follow-up question, becaus…
Interview experiences · Snorkel
Snorkel Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejection After a SnapshotMap Problem
Snorkel AI rejection report. The interview problem was to implement a SnapshotMap. The prompt gave a fairly long background and API requirements, so the first step was to extract the core data model and operation semantics from the business description. The basic interfaces were put(k, v), get(k), and delete(k), extended with take_snapshot() and get(k, snap_id) to read a key's value from a histor…
Interview experiences · Snowflake
Snowflake Account Executive interview: direct outreach without a clear application path
I contacted a sales leader directly on LinkedIn after seeing her post. There was no job description or application link, so I didn't have a clear formal process to follow. She asked for my CV in English, a reference contact and an English cover letter. She said English would be needed because global leadership would take part in hiring. I resent my CV with the cover letter and references, then he…
Interview experiences · Snowflake
Snowflake Account Executive Interview Experience: fourth of five stages
I reached the fourth stage of a five-stage process. The interviews felt normal and focused mainly on my SDR background, target performance, and day-to-day work. Nothing about the questions felt overly complicated or mysterious. I did not get an offer, but the salary made the opportunity hard to walk away from. I still felt it was worth pursuing because the potential upside looked much larger than…
Interview experiences · Snowflake Computing
Snowflake Computing Account Executive Interview Experience: SDR targets at stage four
I made it to the fourth stage, so the early steps had gone well enough to continue. The interview felt normal and centered on my SDR experience, whether I could explain my performance, my targets, and how I handled daily work. It did not feel as though the interviewer was trying to catch me out. They seemed to be checking consistency and clarity. I did not receive an offer. Still, the salary was…
Interview experiences · Snowflake Computing
Snowflake Computing Account Executive interview: requested references and no follow-up
A sales director in Brazil posted on LinkedIn looking for Account Executives. I messaged her with my CV and pointed out that there wasn't a job link or formal posting to apply through. She asked for an English CV, an English cover letter and references from a previous line manager, mentioning WhatsApp as well. She explained that the global hiring leaders were overseas, so English mattered. She ha…
Interview experiences · Snowflake
Snowflake Data Scientist Interview Experience — Built a Streamlit App Instead of LeetCode, Rejected After Onsite
Got in through a referral. Hiring Manager interview — the whole thing was just chatting about my project, it went pretty well, and I moved forward to the next round. Technical round — I'd read a report on the forum saying they usually ask 3sum and some fairly hard SQL, but it turned out to be building a small data application with Streamlit instead. It really did require partition SQL, plus being…
Interview experiences · Snowflake
Snowflake Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — In-Person Onsite with an AI-Augmented Rate Limiter Round and a Reference Check Before the Offer
It's actually been a while since I interviewed, but I was recently looking back on my job switch this year and it came to mind. It was a pretty distinctive interview experience, so I'm writing it down to give back to the forum. I'm an MLE. Every other company I interviewed with leaned toward models; this was the only one that leaned toward agents, and the title was very on-trend: "AI Engineer". T…
Interview experiences · Snowflake
Snowflake Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Quota System Design That Ran Out of Time
Interview process Both sides introduced ourselves. The interviewer asked about one of my projects — I don't quite remember what exactly they asked. Then system design. Then I asked the interviewer some questions. System design Question: design a Quota System that's shared by multiple upstream services. For example, Google Drive and Google Photos share 100GB of space, and each user has one global…