Interview Experiences

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

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5 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

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…

Onsite0
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
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
SnapchatMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Four Onsite Rounds, Still Waiting to Hear Back

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In progressOnsiteXP0
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

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.

Share your experience to earn XP