Snowflake Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

I had two phone interview coding problem rounds. The first one, with a Chinese Professor, wasn't focused on the implementation but rather the problem-solving approach. The task was to guess a hidden number, and while it sounded like Binary Search, there was a twist: feedback on my guess wasn't immediate, only the result of the previous guess was given, making it a Delayed Binary Search. The second round, with a Caucasian Male, involved a very straightforward BFS problem. I'm not sure why I didn't pass; maybe it was a 'team match' issue or a subtle optimization they were looking for. The first round was a classic 'think-on-your-feet' brainteaser. A Delayed Binary Search typically requires wasting a move or managing two search intervals because the nth guess depends on the (n-1)th result, testing state handling and asynchronous feedback.

So, I had a quick call with the recruiter to kick things off. Then, it was straight into two rounds of live coding. The first coding round was kinda tough, the interviewer steered me away from a tree structure I was thinking of and pushed for a brute-force approach. By the time I got that done, there wasn't much time to pivot. The second coding round felt better, though. But yeah, ended up getting a rejection, with feedback mostly pointing to issues from that first round, even though I felt I was on the right track initially. They also asked some general stuff about search trees.

First, there was an online assessment with medium to hard questions, and I had plenty of time to complete it. Then, I had a phone call with the recruiter which was mostly about logistics, no real behavioral questions. After that, I had two 1-hour technical interviews. They asked some basic behavioral questions like 'tell me about yourself' and 'tell me about one of your favorite/most difficult projects.' One interview had a typical medium DS&A question with a follow-up on time/space complexity. The other had a slightly tougher question about distributed systems and reliability. Next, I had a phone call with specific team manager(s). I had multiple of these, and I think expressing interest in a variety of things would be beneficial. There were minimal behavioral questions; mostly they talked about their teams and projects. It felt like they were trying to recruit me more than evaluate me, though it was probably some of both. Finally, I had a call with the recruiter to discuss the offer details.