Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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14 stories

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SnapchatSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

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…

In progressTechnical Screen0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

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…

Technical Screen0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnapchatData Scientist
Aug 2026

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Apr 2026

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

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:…

RejectedOnsite0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Still Waiting to Hear Back

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In progressOnsiteXP0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Five Onsite Rounds, Grilled Until Sweating

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OnsiteXP0
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

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…

No responseTechnical Screen0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

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…

RejectedOnsite0
SnapchatiOS Software Engineer
Jan 2026

Five Rounds of Virtual Onsite, Including a Live Xcode Grid Build

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
SnapchatSoftware Engineer
Nov 2025

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…

In progressTechnical Screen0
SnapchatData Scientist
Oct 2025

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…

Onsite0
SnapchatTechnical Program Manager
Jun 2025

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…

RejectedOnsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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