I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2013
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter for the security team through email about a few openings on the security team. I said, I would like to know more. After a number of email exchanges to set up a time, another recruiter emailed me and told me someone would call me at the scheduled time. The first recruiter mentioned that I will be using the tool on collabedit.com. So far, I was not told what position I was actually interviewing for or whether I was setting up a time for a general interview or whether they were giving me more details! I did apply to a few different roles on their site so I wasn't sure what was up.
Turns out first phone call was with hiring manager and I was getting interviewed for a software engineer position. Hiring manager asked if I was told what positions were available and I said no and he was glad to explain for me. I told the manager I was hoping for a security engineering job, not software engineering. He told me I might be a better fit for a different team and he will tell the other manager I was interested and I will hear from him. I asked if there was a opening on that team and he said they are always hiring new talent. I took that as a good sign. I didn't actually get asked to code during the phone interview. I followed up with the recruiters asking where to proceed and whether I could interview with the manager on the other team and they said they will get back to me.
I waited and got no emails setting up another interview. I asked what's going on and have not heard back. It's been 10 days. I guess I have been dropped?
I am disappointed at the lack of communication and lack of detail from the recruiters. I guess this is common with big companies.
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Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Meta
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.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.
