I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
Had a phone interview followed by on site. Phone interview was good and the interviewer was very friendly. During onsite, I had about 5 one one one interviews. My interviews started on a bad note - the recruiter was late to pick me up from the lobby and my first interviewer came 10 minutes late. He then rushed me into a system design question. I outlined the initial design and checked with him if there were any specific directions he wanted to go into but got no response. I then kept working on the design question without him giving me any feedback. When there were only 5 minutes left, he started asking some questions on how some scenarios would work. I always thought that interviews were supposed to be a discussion rather than the candidate talking and other people listening but perhaps its different at Facebook.
Other interviews were also average - my third interviewer was a girl who seemed too full of herself and kept being very sarcastic. My fourth interviewer hardly showed any interest in my thesis work though he was a very experienced guy so its possible, they are able to absorb everything without even listening.
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.
