Prepare for your Snowflake system design interview

Cloud data warehouse and multi-tenant storage architecture cases calibrated to Snowflake’s cloud-native, performance-first engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Snowflake is looking for

System Design Interview

Cloud Data Architecture Design

01Compute-Storage Separation

02Multi-Tenant Isolation

03Query Execution Optimization

04Auto-Scaling Design

Coding Interview

Technical Coding Round

01SQL & Query Optimization

02Distributed Algorithm Design

03Memory Management

04Performance Profiling

Behavioral Interview

01Customer Obsession

02Data-Driven Engineering

03Cross-Functional Leadership

04Scalability Mindset

Compute-storage separation at cloud scale//Multi-tenant query isolation design//Zero-copy data sharing architecture

Practice Library

Snowflake exercises

Ready to ace your Snowflake system design interview?

Prepare for your Snowflake system design interview

Cloud data warehouse and multi-tenant storage architecture cases calibrated to Snowflake’s cloud-native, performance-first engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Snowflake is looking for

System Design Interview

Cloud Data Architecture Design

01Compute-Storage Separation

02Multi-Tenant Isolation

03Query Execution Optimization

04Auto-Scaling Design

Coding Interview

Technical Coding Round

01SQL & Query Optimization

02Distributed Algorithm Design

03Memory Management

04Performance Profiling

Behavioral Interview

01Customer Obsession

02Data-Driven Engineering

03Cross-Functional Leadership

04Scalability Mindset

Compute-storage separation at cloud scale//Multi-tenant query isolation design//Zero-copy data sharing architecture

How It Works

Master Snowflake System Design Interviews

Cloud data warehouse and storage architecture cases, scored on Snowflake’s engineering evaluation dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your System Design Goals

Distributed Systems Design

Practitioner

Scalability & Tradeoff Analysis

Practitioner

2System Design Case Prep

Design the Snowflake micro-partition metadata index that enables 40x query speedup...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Snowflake

3Frameworks

Framework

Has the cache hit rate degraded significantly?

Is the eviction policy causing premature key expiry?

Cache hit rate dropped from 94% to 31% over 12 minutes

LRU eviction triggered on 8 of 12 shards — max memory 92% utilized

Are hotkey collisions concentrating load on single shards?

Top 3 product SKUs drive 67% of cache reads — all hash to shard 4

Shard 4 CPU at 98% while remaining 11 shards average 31%

Is replication lag causing stale reads from replicas?

Primary-replica replication lag elevated?

Replica lag: 4.2 seconds (normal: <50ms) — reads serving stale prices

Write throughput increased 280% post Black Friday campaign launch

Is read-your-writes consistency violated for session data?

23% of checkout sessions see cart quantity revert after update

Sticky sessions disabled in load balancer 48 hours ago

Is network partitioning or node failure degrading cluster health?

Are cluster nodes experiencing partial network partitions?

2 of 12 Redis nodes reporting intermittent timeouts (AZ-3 subnet)

AZ-3 network maintenance window started 18 minutes ago

4Feedback

Distributed Systems Design

Distinctive

Scalability Reasoning

Strong

Tradeoff Quantification

Meeting Bar

Architectural Communication

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Snowflake exercises

Design the virtual warehouse auto-scaling system in Snowflake that allocates compute...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Cloud Data · System DesignSnowflake

Design Snowflake’s multi-tenant storage layer that stores petabytes across 100,000...

LEARNHard

Cloud Data · System DesignSnowflake

Design the query compilation and micro-partition pruning system in Snowflake that...

LEARNHard

Cloud Data · System DesignSnowflake

Tell me about a time you optimized a data processing system for both throughput and...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Performance EngineeringSnowflake

Describe a situation where you had to design a system serving multiple customers with...

BEHAVIORALHard

Behavioral · Multi-Tenant DesignSnowflake