Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2013
Interview
I was contacted by the recruiter who found me via graph search, and was asked whether I was job hunting. I chose to go onsite for the initial phone screen. The question was straightforward with emphasis on fast and accurate coding, and the interviewer was very knowledgeable.
A few days after the screen the recruiter scheduled an on-site with me, and the dates were quite flexible. The on-site consisted of four interviews, 3 pure coding (of which one is about design) and 1 research interview (I guess this is for all PhD applicants). I was quite happy with the coding ones but the research one was, well, a little annoying since the interviewer seemed to be dismissive to everything. But overall, it was a nice experience, two interviews plus lunch + tour around plus two in the afternoon, and it was done!
I did wait for 3 weeks till the decision was make, and during the period the HR seems to be a little nonresponsive. When I followed up what I received was something like a one line email saying "we are reviewing your case and will come back to you soon". This was a little annoying especially the feeling of being silently rejected started to grow, but I guess it is not the HR's fault anyway.
In the end I was offered a job with flexible titles - software engineer or research scientist or whatever. I decided not to take the offer in the end, but the interview process was very smooth.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Signed NDA, so maybe it's not OK to disclose the questions... It was standard coding questions, not those hard ones at leetcode, but you need to make sure not to make silly mistakes. Missing a few semicolons is file, though.
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
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
