I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2013
Interview
The FB recruiters were very on-the-ball and determined to get me to campus, and worked with me every step of the way. They flew me out, put me up in a nice hotel, and helped me know what to expect in the interviews. The process consisted of four interviews, broken up by lunch. Two "ninja" interviews (coding), one "jedi" interview (personality and values), and one systems design interview (whose cool name I forgot). The questions were tough, but fair. They definitely have a preference for code questions that combine data structures and creative thinking. My only complaint about the process was that they would spend a little too much time prior to starting the coding question asking me about my OS knowledge (I interviewed for a mobile job), and that left me pressed for time (sometimes) on the actual whiteboard coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a web site sharing application, from the base at the phone level to the status of everything in the cloud.
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
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.
