Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

20 stories

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

SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Two One-Hour Coding Rounds, Tree Height and Connect Four

I had my Roblox phone screen yesterday. 45 minutes, two problems. Part 1 was a rate limiter, which I think is a repeat question from the forum. Part 2 was a follow-up: if the request has several fields, rate limit each field separately. Time was pretty tight. Now I wait for the result. I also finished my Snowflake phone screen yesterday. Two rounds, each one hour of coding, in an editor where you…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Tree Deletions and Four-in-a-Row Detection

The author reports two Snowflake coding interviews, each lasting about an hour in an executable editor without AI assistance. The sessions included introductions or project discussion, technical work, and time for questions. The first round examined a multi-child tree where deleting a node promotes its children rather than removing its entire subtree. The initial task asked for the resulting heig…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

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 late…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Two Coding Rounds and Four Problems

IC1 phone screen, with two coding rounds. The interviewers were all very nice. I hope they will show mercy and let me pass. 🙏 Here is the timeline as well: 8/3: Referral 8/4: Scheduled the HR call 8/7: HR call, then the interview was scheduled that same day 9/3: Virtual onsite with two rounds First round: Question 1: Throne Inheritance. The only difference was that init did not provide the king.…

In progressTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Rate Limiter in CoderPad, Ran Out of Time Before the Distributed Follow-up

Snowflake phone screen, one hour, writing Python in CoderPad, and I was allowed to use AI. The recruiter said this round looks at how you ask about requirements, how you test, and how you debug. [Question] Build a rate limiting service. Different clients can have different rate limit tiers, for example free, pro and enterprise. The limits for each tier can be updated at runtime without restarting…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Onsite Coding Rounds, Rejected Over a Tricky Input Assumption

Two onsite rounds, mid-level, both coding. Both rounds were repeat questions I'd seen before, but they happened to be from the few I hadn't practiced. A bit unlucky. Overall the interview experience was fine — the interviewers were all nice, and they asked me a lot about how I use AI in my day-to-day developing cycle. Wiki Hopper — basically a webpage has multiple links that let you jump to other…

RejectedOnsite0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

Two Technical Rounds, Set Card Game Follow-up Ran Out of Time

I interviewed about a month ago. Mid level. The HR screen already told me they would ask medium to hard questions. There were 2 interviews of 1 hour each. In some of them you get 2 questions in the hour, in some just 1. We started with a quick self-introduction and then went straight into the problem. The first round was a variant of a known problem. It asked for the sum of all node values along…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Rate Limiter and N-ary Tree Rounds, No DP Allowed

3 YOE, mid-level. After talking with the HM, there were two phone screens, and they were still pretty hard. Coding 1 Design a rate limiter. Just one rule Multiple rules Is it thread-safe, and how would you make it thread-safe (lock) If the request handler throws an exception for a given request, that request shouldn't be counted Don't drop the other rate-limited requests — when there's spare capa…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jun 2026

Onsite Coding and Job Scheduler System Design, No Offer

Coding: this was an OO design problem I hadn't seen anywhere on the forum before, implementing two functions. One function is addTask(taskId, priority, timestamp) — the same task can be added multiple times at different timestamps. The other is executeTask(), which is the tricky part — you first sort by priority, and if a task has already been executed, you skip it. System design: job scheduler.…

RejectedOnsite0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Reported May 2026

Self-Written Test Cases in the Screens, Then an IC1 Offer

Hi all! I got an offer from Snowflake for the IC1 level, and I'm posting my loop here in case it helps someone who's getting ready. It began with a recruiter contacting me, followed by a first conversation with the hiring manager. We went over the team, when the interviews would happen, and what they were looking for. Nothing surprising, but it gave me some context before the real interviews. Nex…

OfferOnsite0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
May 2026

A Vague Distributed Tree Counting Design Problem

Phone Screen 1 The interviewer gave me a distributed tree counting problem that took me a while to even understand. There was no starter code or example — he just said to imagine tree nodes distributed across different places on a network, and my job was to design a class to accomplish that. The problem was way too vague at the start, and we spent a long time discussing what exactly he wanted. I…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Mid-Level Three-Round Coding Loop, Rejected After Mixed Feedback

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedOnsiteXP0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Two Phone Screens, Onsite, Rejected on Coding Signal Feedback

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedOnsiteXP0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Coding Phone Screens and a Quick Rejection

Both rounds of my coding phone screens were with interviewers from the company's tagged LeetCode question set. I'd recommend grinding more LeetCode before you go in. The first round was LC 210 style — directed graph topological sort. Not much to say about the problem itself, except I had to write my own test cases. The interviewer for this round didn't seem to be feeling well — she was coughing a…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Course Schedule Coding Round, Failed on the LLM Round

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Two Virtual Onsite Coding Rounds With a CEO-Themed Query Problem

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

In progressOnsiteXP0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Binary Search on Error Logs, Then a Graph BFS/DFS Follow-up

A classic problem in application-question form. Binary Search The input is a log history. There are three kinds of logs: Info, Warn, and Error, and each log starts with its own type — for example, an Info-type log looks like "[Info] ...". The log history follows two patterns: Once an Error shows up, the service is down, and every log after that is also Error. The first Error is always preceded by…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

Log Binary Search With Two Graph Follow-ups

A classic problem in applied-problem form. Binary Search The input is a log history. There are three types of logs: Info, Warn, and Error, and each log line starts with its own type — for example an Info log looks like "[Info] ...". The log history follows two patterns: Once an Error shows up, the service goes down, and every log after that is Error The log right before the first Error is always…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

A Trie Backtracking Bug I Never Fixed

First round: the interviewer — I really feel bad, she kept trying to help me the whole time, but in the end I still didn't get the bug fixed within the hour. The input is a string array: [California, California/San Francisco, California/San Francisco/7th Street], etc. The other input is an array of the nodes to delete, e.g. [California/San Francisco], and the return should be [California]. LeetCo…

Technical Screen0
SnowflakeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2025

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…

RejectedTechnical 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