My Meta Interview Experience (Mid-Level [E4] | USA | Reject After Follow Up)
Preparation: Standard top 100 LC problems + Infra System Design Problems + Behavioral problems (STAR)
Interviews
Meta phone screen: Asked two questions directly from the top 50 LC tagged (Array Sum and Tree BFS categories). Aced both questions and was notified the next day that I had moved on to onsite.
Onsite prep: This would be my first system design interview and I didn't want to mess it up. I booked multiple Hello Interview mocks and though they weren't cheap, I was satisfied with the overall quality, feedback, and accurate grading.
Meta onsite 1 (coding): This round tripped me up and I was disappointed given how much I had prepared 🙁
- First question: Tree BFS (got optimal runtime, but not optimal space)
- Second question: Multiple binary searches on an array (did not get the optimal solution, couldn't find a question to tag)
- Immediately after the round, I realized my mistakes on both questions but couldn't go back and change it 🙁
Meta onsite 2 (behavioral): No surprise questions and I answered them to the best of my capacity stressing my ability to work with other people specifically
Meta onsite 3 (system design): The question is similar to Post Search
- I had trouble understanding the interviewer and threw all my system design knowledge out there. There wasn't much discussion but I did mention concepts such as inverted index, sharding, replication, hot partitions, cache invalidations
Meta onsite 4 (coding)
- This was my strongest performance and I was proud of myself after this round. I solved both questions optimally
- Question 1: Number Verification (LC Hard)
- Question 2: Tree BFS
- Surprisingly (given my other rounds) I received a call the next day saying that they wanted to give me a follow-up coding round
Meta onsite 5 (follow-up coding)
- I fumbled this round, which was especially heartbreaking. The questions were related to Palindrome (LC Hard) and Grid DFS
- Same day I was notified that I was rejected 🙁
Eye-opening experience overall and I know I have much more work to pass next time around. Total time: ~1.5 months
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Discussion
(5 comments)- 102 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
This is so helpful, thank you for sharing! I'll continue the trend and share a few questions I got asked as an Android dev way back in 2017:
- Design the Facebook news feed with 3 story types (diving in RecyclerView)
- How does AsyncTask work? Explain threading in Android.
- How would you sort an array of size N where you know the array consists of K sub-lists, each of which are sorted?
- Explain a time when you had a technical disagreement, and how did you resolve it?
- Implement prefix search across Strings with regex.
- 8
2 months agoSenior Software Engineer at VWWe need more content like this that shares interview experiences in Taro.
- 0
2 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroWe're working on this right now! It will be one of our first (and hopefully biggest) launches in 2025.
- 42 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Thanks for sharing and sorry to hear that you didn't make it in the end. You'll get them next time! LeetCode hard problems are particularly annoying as for a lot of them, you either know the answer or you don't 🫤
For future data structures and algorithms help, check this out (it covers how FAANG rounds are graded): Master The Data Structures And Algorithms Interview
For other folks who are in the Meta loop, I recommend this: "How does the Meta interview work?"
I shared my full Meta interview experience here: How Alex Got Into Meta With 0 Prior LeetCode Experience
- 22 months agoSenior Software Engineer
Hey for what it's worth, I had the same experience as you. Except I had 2 follow ups: 1 coding and 1 system design. Fumbled in coding. They said to try again in a year.
