I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2013
Interview
I originally applied online and spoke with one recruiter. She did not feel I was a good fit for the team she was recruiting for but referred me to another recruiter at Facebook. I spoke with the second recruiter on the phone and she set a technical interview on-site in Menlo Park. The guy who interviewed me was very nice and while I didn't do a great job on the question, they liked me enough to schedule a full day of interviews.
After some preparation, I came onsite for a full-day of technical interviews with a lunch break in the middle. The pace was very fast but I knew it would be like that so I was prepared. The questions were difficult especially in the limited amount of time. Everyone was very nice. There was a design round where I was asked to design an iPhone app that was unrelated to social networking.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
A lot of people asked about my experience in writing iPhone apps and what was challenging about it.
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
