Snap VO, rejected
Result: Rejected Number of Rounds: 5
Snap VO, 5 rounds in one day.
Round 1 (Coding): Graph problem, social connections and friend-of-friend lookups. Got through both parts with a few minutes left.
Round 2 (Coding): String manipulation with edge case constraints. Less clean, stumbled on the edge handling but got to a working solution.
Round 3 (System Design): Story feed design, what to show users when they open Snap and how to rank it. Had a decent back-and-forth on fanout vs. pull approaches.
Round 4 (BQ): Standard stuff about collaboration and conflict. Nothing unusual.
Round 5 (Deep Dive): Went deep on a distributed caching system I built. Lost the interviewer when they pushed on failure recovery and I fumbled through it.
Rejection came a week later, no specifics. Still not sure if it was Round 2 or the deep dive. Probably both.
Replies (3)
round 5 deep dive sounds rough. did they give you the topic in advance?
nope, it's your own project. you go in knowing you'll be asked to deep dive something you worked on recently
5 rounds in one day is brutal. was there any break between them?
short breaks between rounds, 10-15 mins each. recruiter checked in between a couple of them
deep dive round is notorious at snap. heard from multiple people that it trips up even strong candidates