Como se preparar para entrevistas na Snowflake

+15

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it?

+14

What project are you most proud of?

+10

Design a Job Scheduler

Design a distributed job scheduler that can handle high-throughput job processing (10,000+ jobs per second), support both scheduled (cron-based) and ad-hoc job execution, include retry mechanisms for failed jobs, and maintain execution history for up to one year.

+9

Describe your most impactful project

Tell me about a project where you failed

Leetcode 212. Word Search II

Given an m×n letter grid and a list of words, find all words that can be formed by sequentially adjacent (horizontal/vertical) non-repeating cells. The core challenge is efficiently searching many candidate words on the board using DFS/backtracking with prefix pruning (e.g., a Trie) to handle up to 12×12 boards and tens of thousands of words.

Leetcode 23. Merge k Sorted Lists

Leetcode 2050. Parallel Courses III

Given a DAG of course prerequisites where each course has a duration and any number of courses can run in parallel once prerequisites are satisfied, compute the minimum time to finish all courses. This is the classic longest-path/critical-path problem on a node-weighted DAG — compute each course's earliest completion time as max(completion times of prerequisites) + its duration.

Give me an example of a time when you were not able to meet a commitment.

Leetcode 588. Design In-Memory File System

Design an in-memory hierarchical file system that supports path parsing and operations like mkdir, ls, addContentToFile (append/create), and readContentFromFile, requiring you to model directories vs files and maintain file contents. The core challenge is choosing an efficient tree/trie structure to handle traversal, creation, and listing (often lexicographically) while correctly distinguishing files from directories.

Leetcode 2303. Calculate Amount Paid in Taxes

Given sorted tax brackets with upper bounds and percentages, compute the progressive tax on a given income by summing, for each bracket in order, the taxed portion (the income within that bracket) multiplied by its rate until the income is exhausted.

Leetcode 545. Boundary of Binary Tree

Return the boundary of a binary tree: list nodes on the left boundary top-down (excluding leaves), then all leaves left-to-right, then the right boundary bottom-up (excluding leaves), avoiding duplicates. The challenge is to traverse and partition nodes correctly (including edge cases like single-node or skewed trees) while preserving the required order.

Why do you want to work at Snowflake

Design a data ingestion system

Design a system that ingests high-frequency drone test data (sensor readings at 1-20Hz, video) and enables other teams to query and analyze the collected data.

Design a Quota Manager for LinkedIn APIs

Design a quota management system for LinkedIn's API that enforces consistent rate limiting across clients and allows users to purchase additional quota when needed.

Leetcode 1723. Find Minimum Time to Finish All Jobs

Partition the given job times into k worker workloads so that the maximum sum assigned to any worker is as small as possible — a balanced k-way partitioning problem. With n ≤ 12 this is typically solved by exhaustive search/bitmask DP with strong pruning or by binary-searching the answer and checking feasibility via DFS.

Design a Webhook Callback System

Design a webhook system that allows applications to register callback URLs and automatically receive HTTP POST notifications when specific events occur in other applications.

Design a leasing system

Design a system that allows engineers to reserve one of five dedicated test environments for running tests (20 minutes to 3 hours), with future scheduling capabilities and robust handling of failures like hanging jobs or unresponsive environments.

Leetcode 872. Leaf-Similar Trees

Check whether two binary trees produce the same left-to-right sequence of leaf node values — i.e., extract each tree’s leaf values in order and return true if the two sequences are identical.

Design a sequence number generator

Design a distributed sequence number generator that produces unique, monotonically increasing numbers across multiple servers. The system should handle 10,000 requests per second while ensuring no duplicate numbers are generated.

Leetcode 1861. Rotating the Box

Rotate an m×n grid 90° clockwise and simulate gravity so each stone '#' falls until blocked by an obstacle '*' or another stone, returning the resulting n×m grid. The core challenge is compacting stones within obstacle-separated segments toward the gravity direction after rotation.

Leetcode 155. Min Stack

Design a stack supporting push, pop, top, and getMin operations all in O(1) time. The core challenge is to maintain and update the current minimum efficiently so getMin returns the smallest element present even after arbitrary pushes and pops.

Leetcode 1136. Parallel Courses

Given n courses and prerequisite pairs, determine the minimum number of semesters required to finish all courses if you can take any number of courses per semester as long as all their prerequisites are already completed; return -1 if a cycle makes completion impossible. This reduces to topological sorting / BFS layer-by-layer on the DAG to count semesters (or detecting cycles).

Leetcode 202. Happy Number

Determine whether iterating n -> sum of the squares of its digits eventually reaches 1 or falls into a repeating cycle; the core task is to detect cycles in this generated sequence (e.g., via a visited set or Floyd's cycle-finding).