I got reached out to through LinkedIn and managed to line up a recruiter call, but the recruiter didn’t show. We reconnected a few days later, then the recruiting team followed up again to schedule the initial phone screen.
Even before the interview started, the timing issues and last-minute changes made it feel less polished than I expected. The phone screen eventually happened, but the interviewer had been swapped at the last minute, and the call started a few minutes late. That combination threw off the rhythm right away, and it made it harder to settle into the problem-solving mindset.
Reported
I went through Snap for a backend Software Engineer role after applying to a ~3 YOE opening and then being contacted by a recruiter. I asked about the interview process and got a little over a month to prepare, which honestly helped me feel less rushed going into the first technical conversation. The process moved fairly quickly after that—after my phone interview, I heard I was moving to the onsite the next morning.
My phone interview felt structured and calm. The interviewer was friendly and professional and started with a behavioral question focused on handling uncertainty. Then the technical part was graph-based: it was built around BFS but included a “trap” style rabbit hole if you didn’t fully understand the graph details. I managed to get a working solution with test cases and talked through how I’d build the adjacency list most effectively, though I didn’t end up finishing the full coding portion. During the Q&A, the conversation shifted to privacy—specifically how important it was at Snap—and I happened to read a Snap Engineering blog post relating to differential privacy, which seemed to land well with the interviewer.
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