Snabbit SDE-3 Interview Experience | Selected

My interview journey with Snabbit for the SDE-3 role involved a mix of coding challenges, system design problems, and discussions around engineering leadership. With around six years of experience at a product-based company, I found the process covered both technical depth and the ability to make sound decisions as a senior engineer.

Interview Process

• Round 1: Machine Coding and Low-Level Design

• Round 2: High-Level System Design

• Round 3: Hiring Manager Discussion

Round 1: Building a Twitter-Like Application

The first round was a practical design-and-coding exercise. I was asked to build a basic Twitter-like application in Java, with the constraint that no database would be used.

The application needed to support four primary operations:

• Publishing a tweet.

• Following another user.

• Unfollowing an account.

• Generating a feed containing the latest K tweets from the user and the accounts they follow.

An important part of the problem was maintaining the correct order of tweets using timestamps or sequence numbers.

After discussing the requirements, we explored different data structures for implementing the functionality efficiently. I considered using a PriorityQueue to retrieve the most recent tweets, but this brought up questions about accessing the top K elements without removing entries from the queue.

I also discussed an alternative using a TreeMap and compared the trade-offs between the approaches.

For the final part, I used an AI-assisted coding tool to implement the LLD based on the design notes we had discussed. The exercise was less about simply writing code and more about choosing the right data structures, explaining the design, and translating the solution into a working implementation.

Round 2: Designing a Scalable Like-Counting System

The next round moved from application-level design to system architecture.

Problem statement: Design a service that tracks likes on videos for a large video-streaming platform.

The main challenge was to build a system that could process a huge number of like requests while providing accurate counts and fast responses when users viewed videos.

We discussed how to handle simultaneous updates, prevent increments from being lost, and choose suitable storage for maintaining like counts. Read performance was another important consideration, since the service would need to return counts quickly even as traffic increased.

The conversation also covered scalability and reliability as the platform grew in terms of both users and videos.

This round tested my ability to reason about system bottlenecks, data consistency, concurrent operations, and architectural decisions under high traffic.

Round 3: Hiring Manager Interview

The last round was more focused on my experience and how I work with people and teams.

The interviewer asked questions around my current responsibilities, motivation for joining Snabbit, and approach to mentoring and collaboration.

A few questions from the discussion were:

• What have been your major contributions at your current organization?

• Why do you want to work at Snabbit?

• How do you approach mentoring less-experienced engineers?

• Describe a disagreement with a product or business team and how you handled it.

• How do you manage priorities and deliver results in a fast-moving environment?

The discussion focused on taking ownership, helping other engineers grow, resolving conflicts constructively, and balancing technical decisions with business requirements.

Final Result: Selected

I cleared all three rounds and was selected for the SDE-3 position at Snabbit.

Sharing this in the hope that it gives other experienced engineers a useful reference while preparing for similar opportunities.