I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2013
Interview
I was contacted on 25 February via LinkedIn following a recommendation. The position was in the Mobile Operations team. It was followed by a series of phone interviews:
- one with the technical sourcer
- one with the head of the team
- two more with some specialists in various departments
Following the phone interviews, was an onsite interview in Menlo Park on 22 April. Given the 10 hrs time zone difference, they were sympathetic with the jet lag and flew me there on Saturday for the Monday interviews. The interview day had five sessions:
- one with the head of the team
- one with guys from the team (codding session)
- one with a guy from management
- two more with guys from other departments (systems and networking)
With the exception of codding interview, where a second guy was there to observe, all other interviews were 1:1
I flew out on Tuesday, and on Thursday I received a call that they were happy with my performance and we can move forward.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I expected a tirade of technical questions. The unexpected part was that the interview was both ways: they interviewed me, I interviewed them. Most parts were more like brainstorming session than exams.
The most difficult question was when a guy showed me a gdb stack trace of the threads within a process which hung. It was an facebook internal application, so I had no previous knowledge of that application. The question was what went wrong. Luckily, it was a clear situation where all threads were waiting for a blocked thread.
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.
