went through the Snowflake EM loop earlier this year for a role managing a 6-person backend team. i'm a first-time manager (1 year in at my current place) so i was nervous about how much weight they'd put on pure management experience vs. technical depth. sharing what i found.
the loop was 6 rounds: recruiter screen (standard) hiring manager conversation (exploratory, culture fit) engineering director: system design + leadership senior IC: technical depth / coding (yes, coding even for EM) peer EM: cross-team collaboration scenarios bar raiser equivalent: values and judgment calls
System design: the SD round was full 45 minutes, architect something at Snowflake's scale. they asked me to design a query scheduling system for a multi-tenant environment. i had to think about fairness, priority queues, resource limits per account. it was hard. they want EMs to be technically credible, not just process managers.
Coding: yes there was a coding screen. it wasn't LeetCode hard but it wasn't trivial either. medium-difficulty problem, they want to see that you can still write clean code. if you've drifted too far from the keyboard as an EM, spend a week refreshing.
Behavioral / leadership: every round had behavioral questions woven in. the big themes were: handling underperformers (they pushed hard here), managing cross-functional conflict, prioritization when everything is on fire at once. the peer EM round felt like it was specifically testing whether you'd be collaborative or territorial.
What they care about: i got the sense they want EMs who still have strong technical opinions and can earn respect from senior ICs. the "manager as pure process person" archetype would not do well here.
didn't get the offer, they went with someone with a longer management track record. but the feedback was specific and useful, which i actually appreciated. the process itself was well-run, no ghosting.