Background
I got laid off from my last job, a small-scale public company that pays at the top of the market, in the Coinbase / Dropbox / Airbnb tier. It was mostly because of a re-org, even though I had been rated Exceeds three years running.
Still, after working through a system design course and building up a pile of leadership stories (you want enough of them to cover something like 40-50 different leadership, people management, collaboration and conflict prompts), I ended up with 3 offers in two months.
The strongest one came from Snapchat, for an L6 Engineering Manager role, at $690,000 total comp. That is about 30% above my old package. I am really happy with how it turned out, because I had been planning to leave eventually anyway and this layoff just pushed me out the door sooner.
Prep
Coding
I went through the 20 most frequently asked LeetCode problems. Mostly I wanted to get back into the habit of writing code, since three years as an EM left me with almost no hands-on work. I was a senior SWE before that, but I drifted away from it after moving into management.
Many companies skip coding for EM candidates, though the better ones still include it. The bar is clearly lower than for SWE.
System Design
You absolutely have to nail this as an EM. In my opinion it is the round where you stand out.
I worked through every sample question in the system design course I was using. On top of that I went deep on database architecture, caching, scaling, failure handling, CDNs, pub/sub, queues and similar topics. Please do not skip these. They matter a lot, and relearning them is kind of fun.
I would put 50-60% of your prep time here, because it is the hardest area to do well in.
Behavioural
This bucket covers behavioral, people management, conflict, promotion, PIP, project execution, collaboration and so on. In short, how good a leader you are, and whether you can deliver projects while holding a high bar for your team.
Choose 2-3 big projects from your career where you had real impact. Avoid small ones that took a couple of sprints. Pick long-running ones, so you can talk about how it started, how you got people aligned, how you prioritized, and the rest.
Then use those projects to answer every "tell me about a time when" prompt. Prepare at least 12-15 distinct stories that you can bend to fit similar-sounding questions.
This round decides everything. You can be excellent technically, but if the leadership interviews go badly you will not get through.
I leaned on ChatGPT quite a bit to check and shape my stories. Still, write your own specific examples first and use it only for structure, or your answers will come out too generic.
Interview Experience
Recruiter Screening
A recruiter contacted me because my background overlapped heavily with the position (funnily enough, I was eventually hired for a different role). It was simple: some background questions and whether I was actually interested in joining Snapchat.
First Screening
One leadership round and one system design round.
Snapchat cares a lot about the technical side, so in the system design round they dig deep into many areas. Even the leadership round can drift into technical decision making.
Onsite
System Design
A second system design round, this one closer to the domain of the team you are interviewing with. For example, if it is the Spotlight team, they might ask you to design an Instagram-style feed.
System Design
You choose a project you built and walk through its design, going into the decisions and technical tradeoffs.
Leadership
People management skills, plus promotion, conflict and PIP type questions.
Behavioural
Your motivations, how you take feedback, how you deal with a team restructuring, and similar topics.
Hiring Manager
A set of "how would you..." questions tailored to the specific team you would be leading.
Every interview runs an hour. The one thing that stood out about Snapchat is how far they dig into the technical parts, so be ready to discuss them in depth.
Discussion
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