Snap full loop - coding rounds had rough spots but everything else went fine

Snap full loop - coding rounds had rough spots but everything else went fine

Result: Pending Number of Rounds: 5

Applied through a referral. Recruiter reached out same day and scheduled phone screen within 3 days. The whole thing moved unusually fast.

Phone screen was the sliding window + max unique users problem. Given a list of timestamps and user_id pairs, find the max number of unique users in any time window of size K. Got it including the follow-up on duplicate users within a window.

Onsite was 5 rounds. Coding rounds are interviewer-authored. Not standard LC, so you can't really memorize your way through. First coding round was an insert/delete/getRandom with duplicates variant. Got the main problem but didn't nail the duplicate handling follow-up before time. Second coding was the card set validation. 3 cards, 4 features each in {1,2,3}, valid set means each feature is all-same or all-different. Spent too long on the combinatorics.

AI-enabled round had Claude Opus available. Task was bug fix in a priority queue then extending to a concurrent queue for a web crawler. Key strategy: understand the problem yourself before touching the AI, then give clear instructions. Worked better than expected.

System design was news aggregator without RSS. Sources don't support it so you call their APIs to scrape content. No-RSS constraint added some wrinkles to the standard aggregator design.

Technical communication round was unusual. Explain your current team's work to a hypothetical new hire. Just drew diagrams and walked through the architecture.

Compensation here is top-tier. Honestly expect to be stack ranked out given the rough coding rounds. We'll see.