real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
Snapchat Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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14 results
- Model Deep Dives and Organization-Chart CodingSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
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…
- A 60-Minute Split Between ML and CodingSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
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…
- LRU Cache and Thread SafetySnapchat · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
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…
- Two Bugs, No Time, and a RejectionSnapchat · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
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…
- Unexpected Regression Questions and Camera-Event SQLSnapchat · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
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…
- ML Infra Loop With Misleading Prep, No OfferSnapchat · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2026Rejected
I interviewed for Snap SDE ML infra in September. Posting my rejection story as a reference for whoever comes after. Phone screen: an unusual problem, data stream processing. Every incoming data point can be stored into a stored cluster (you decide from the data itself whether it belongs to an existing cluster or is the first data point of a new cluster). You also have to implement a function tha…
- ML Fundamentals, Transformers, and a Botched Course ScheduleSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
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…
- Failed on the Onsite's Third RoundSnapchat · Software Engineer · Onsite · Mar 2026Rejected
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:…
- Two Rounds on Video Retrieval and CLIP, Then SilenceSnapchat · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026No response
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…
- Five-Round Virtual Onsite, Auto-Rejected With No ReasonSnapchat · Software Engineer · Onsite · Jan 2026Rejected
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…
- Two System Design Rounds and a Project Deep DiveSnapchat · Engineering Manager · Senior+ · Onsite · Jan 2026Offer
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 diff…
- Implementing sin(x) by Hand on the Phone ScreenSnapchat · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Nov 2025In progress
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…
- Four Onsite Rounds, Treated as PracticeSnapchat · Data Scientist · Onsite · Oct 2025
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…
- Seven Rounds Over Two Months, No OfferSnapchat · Technical Program Manager · Onsite · Jun 2025Rejected
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…
