I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2012
Interview
First step is one or two phone screens, then a half-day or more of on-site interviews. Focus is on programming and architecture talent, but they're also looking for a good cultural fit. An important thing is that you may be interviewed targeted for a specific function, or for general engineering qualifications. In any case, after boojtcamp, you will be shopped around to all the groups that are looking for people, and you get to call your shot, so you don't have to have your specific career path chosen before you apply.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most challenging question was an exercise in designing a system to do spam detection work and describing it in a huge flowchart, as might be done in an early but detailed product planning session. Be prepared to think on large scales.
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.
