Snowflake Software Engineer interview experience

It started with a technical screen that was brutal in the moment: I had to design a metadata service for columnar storage and talk through sharding strategies, and it left me drained even before the later rounds.

On the onsite, I ran into multiple system design rounds with complex questions, plus behavioral interviews. What surprised me was how real and interactive the technical conversations felt—less like memorizing patterns and more like reasoning under pressure with tradeoffs. In fact, I’d practiced a very similar problem shortly before, which helped me stay calmer than I otherwise