Snowflake interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Snowflake software engineering interview across 4 levels and 27 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Snowflake salary & ratings · All interview processes

Data Engineer Intern – Pune (2026) (on-campus historically titled 'Software Engineer Intern')

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~2-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: No formally published intern reapplication cooldown. Campus

  1. Round 0: Online Assessment (HackerRank / Python + SQL)

    Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Subsets — Given an integer array of distinct integers, return all possible subsets (the power set). The solution set must not contain duplicate subsets. Read n then n integers from stdin; print every subset, one per line, in [a b c] form.

  2. Round 1: Technical Interview(s) (Panel / Zoom)

    Onsite · ~20-45 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Course Schedule II — There are numCourses courses labeled 0..numCourses-1 and a list of prerequisite pairs. Return an ordering of courses to finish all of them, or report it is impossible if a cycle exists. Read numCourses and m, then m lines 'a b' meaning course b must be taken before course a; print a valid order space-separated, or IMPOSSIBLE.

  3. Round 2: HR / Fit Discussion

    Behavioral · ~15-20 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer (IC2 / entry-mid, Pune India)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Initial Screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank / CodeSignal)

    Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

    Sample question: Task Scheduler — Given a char array of CPU tasks and a cooldown integer n, each task takes one unit and the same task must be separated by at least n units of idle/other work. Return the minimum number of time units the CPU needs to finish all tasks.

  3. Round 2: Technical Phone Screen

    Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live interview · CoderPad

    Sample question: Max Area of Island — Given an R x C binary grid, an island is a 4-directionally connected group of 1s. Return the maximum area (number of cells) of any island, or 0 if there is none.

  4. Round 3: Onsite - Coding

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Subsets — Given an integer array of unique elements, return all possible subsets (the power set). The solution set must not contain duplicate subsets.

  5. Round 4: Onsite - System Design / Expertise

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design an In-Memory File System — Design an in-memory file system supporting ls (list directory contents sorted), mkdir (create directory path), addContentToFile (create/append), and readContentFromFile. Discuss the tree data structure, path parsing, and thread-safety considerations.

  6. Round 5: Onsite - Behavioral / Values

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  7. Round 6: Onsite - Close / Debrief

    Other · ~30-60 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

Senior Software Engineer (IC3 / IC4, Pune India)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Hiring Manager Screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical Phone Screen (DSA + System Design)

    Phone · ~2 hours · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · CodeSignal

    Sample question: Design a distributed rate limiter — Design a distributed rate-limiting service enforcing per-client per-second throttling across many app servers. Discuss token bucket vs sliding window, where counters live (local vs Redis vs gossip), and how to keep throttling accurate while avoiding hot-spotting and thundering-herd on a shared counter.

  3. Round 2: Onsite - Tech Talk / Presentation

    Onsite · ~30 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  4. Round 3: Onsite - Coding

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Subarrays with K Different Integers — Given an integer array and integer k, return the number of good subarrays, where a good subarray has exactly k distinct integers. Solve in O(n) using atMost(k) - atMost(k-1).

  5. Round 4: Onsite - System Design

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a distributed key-value store with versioning / time travel — Design a distributed KV store exposing PUT/GET/DELETE with global versioning and point-in-time (time-travel) reads, strong consistency, and replication. Discuss partitioning, a consensus/replication scheme (e.g. Raft), MVCC-style versioned storage, and handling of contention on hot keys.

  6. Round 5: Onsite - Expertise

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  7. Round 6: Onsite - Behavioral / Values

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  8. Round 7: Onsite - Close

    Other · ~30-60 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

Staff / Principal Software Engineer (IC5+, Pune India)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: Deep infra/data-systems system-design ma · Cooldown: ~12 months

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / Hiring Manager Screen

    Phone · ~30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Technical Phone Screen

    Phone · ~2 hours · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling — Given n jobs each with startTime, endTime, and profit, select a non-overlapping subset maximizing total profit (a job may start exactly when another ends). Return the maximum profit.

  3. Round 2: Onsite - Tech Talk / Presentation

    Onsite · ~30 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  4. Round 3: Onsite - Coding

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Word Search II — Given an R x C board of lowercase letters and a list of words, return all words that can be formed by sequentially adjacent (4-directional) cells, where a cell may not be reused within one word. Use a Trie for efficiency.

  5. Round 4: Onsite - System Design (deep)

    System_design · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a multi-tenant quota / resource enforcement service — Design a service that lets admins SET a quota per (tenant, resource) and strictly enforces it: no connecting client may ever exceed its quota, even under concurrent distributed access. Discuss strong consistency vs performance, distributed counting/reservation, handling clock skew and partial failures, and how it plugs into a cloud data warehouse's compute/credit accounting.

  6. Round 5: Onsite - Expertise

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  7. Round 6: Onsite - Behavioral / Values

    Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  8. Round 7: Onsite - Cross-Functional / Collaboration

    Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

  9. Round 8: Onsite - Close

    Other · ~30-60 min · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

Other companies' interview processes

Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.