Meta
Social media and metaverse company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had a technical disagreement with a senior engineer or tech lead. How did you handle the situation, and what was the outcome?
#Conflict Resolution
#Communication
#Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a project where you had to 'Move Fast' but realized you were accumulating significant technical debt. How did you balance the need for speed with long-term maintainability?
#Trade-offs
#Technical Debt
#Move Fast
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you identified a problem outside of your immediate team's scope and took the initiative to solve it.
#Ownership
#Cross-functional Collaboration
#Focus on Long-Term Impact
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you received critical feedback from a peer or manager that surprised you. How did you process it and what changes did you make?
#Self-Awareness
#Growth Mindset
#Feedback
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a string s representing a user's text input, return true if the string can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character.
#Two Pointers
#String Manipulation
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a string of '(' , ')' and lowercase English characters representing a malformed mathematical expression in a Meta internal tool. Remove the minimum number of parentheses so that the resulting string is valid and return it.
#Stacks
#String Manipulation
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given the root of a binary tree representing a hierarchical DOM structure, return the vertical order traversal of its nodes' values (from top to bottom, column by column).
#Breadth-First Search
#Hash Table
#Binary Trees
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given a list of user session intervals [start, end] representing the time a user spent active on the Facebook app, merge all overlapping sessions to return an array of non-overlapping continuous active sessions.
#Sorting
#Arrays
#Intervals
Software Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given two nodes p and q in a binary tree representing an organizational chart, return their lowest common ancestor (LCA). Each node has a reference to its parent node, but you do not have a reference to the root.
#Trees
#Pointers
#Linked Lists
Software Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given an array of integers representing daily ad click counts and a target integer k, return the total number of continuous days (subarrays) whose sum of clicks equals exactly k.
#Prefix Sum
#Hash Table
#Arrays
Software Engineer
•
System Design
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hard
Design the Facebook News Feed system. Users should be able to see a continuously updated list of posts from their friends and pages they follow, ranked by relevance.
#Distributed Systems
#Database Schema
#Caching
#Fan-out
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a distributed Rate Limiter for the Meta Graph API. It needs to handle millions of requests per second globally, ensuring that individual third-party developers do not exceed their allocated quota.
#Rate Limiting
#Redis
#Distributed Consensus
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design WhatsApp's end-to-end message delivery system. Focus on how messages are routed when a user is offline, and how media (images/videos) are handled efficiently.
#WebSockets
#Message Queues
#Blob Storage
#E2E Encryption
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to track and display 'Trending Topics' (Top K Heavy Hitters) across Facebook and Instagram in real-time. The system must process billions of events per day.
#Stream Processing
#Count-Min Sketch
#MapReduce
#Kafka
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed web crawler that Meta could use to scrape the internet to build an index for a Large Language Model (LLM) training dataset. Focus on politeness, deduplication, and scale.
#Distributed Systems
#Graph Traversal
#Deduplication
#DNS Resolution
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.