I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in May 2016
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter and asked to have a chat after which they promptly set up an interview without even asking me if I wanted to go ahead. Quite aggressive. I then had a remote coding interview with someone from the US office who didn't really bother telling me where they were located. He had a heavy south Indian accent that I could barely understand and seemed more interested in talking about himself and his job at Facebook than asking about my current role. He was unable to explain the problem at hand well enough for me to understand and when I asked probing questions he repeated himself like a broken record. For example when he asked me the space complexity, I was working under the assumption that he wanted me to make a copy of the data structure. I work mostly with immutable data so a copy is normal. He seemed surprised at my answer and we went back and forth until I finally figured out he was expecting me to modify it in place. I later found out his English language ability was quite poor as I asked him some basic non-technical questions and he asked me what certain words meant. He also cut me off while I was trying to explain my solution to him and proceeded to give me the solution which I thought was rather unfair. I guess at that point he failed me already.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of lists, where each node has a "bottom" and/or "right" child, and each bottom child has a bottom child, flatten it to return a list where all of them are right children. E.g.
A->B->C
|
A1
|
A2
becomes
A->A1->A2->B->C
etc.
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Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Meta
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.
