Meta Interviews

I participated in the Meta online assessment on CodeSignal. The assessment was divided into multiple levels, each adding more complexity to the task management system. Level 1 involved basic operations like adding, updating, and retrieving tasks. Level 2 introduced search and list functionalities with specific sorting rules. Level 3 added user management with quotas and task assignment. Level 4 had some unclear requirements, but it was a comprehensive exercise that tested both data structures and system design skills. The entire process was quite intense and required careful planning and attention to detail.

Started with a coding round where I was asked to merge three sorted arrays and then solve the Binary Tree Right Side View problem. The interviewer was very supportive, asking me to explain my code and how I would test it.

In the AI round, I was given a problem where I had to find a subset of words that uses as many characters as possible without repeating any letters. The hint suggested using DFS, but the interviewer wasn't helpful, leading me to focus on passing unit tests. I managed to solve the first two but struggled with the third and fourth, and the interviewer's guidance was unclear.

The system design round involved designing Instagram with posts, images, and friends, and the interviewer asked about consistent hashing and handling high read traffic for the feed service.

The behavioral round covered conflicts with coworkers, negative feedback from managers, and handling ambiguous requirements. The AI round was a significant setback, affecting the overall outcome.

I recently completed my phone screen interview for an SDE-2 role at Meta. The interview lasted 45 minutes and consisted of two challenging Data Structures and Algorithms problems, leaving very little time for overthinking.

I successfully navigated both problems and am pleased to share that I have been selected to proceed to the onsite rounds. I look forward to sharing my onsite experience soon.

Coding Round 1

This round focused on algorithmic problem-solving. I was asked:

1. The "K Closest Points to Origin" problem. I had to find the K points closest to the origin (0,0) from a given set of points.
2. A variant of the "Subarray Sum Equals K" problem. Beyond just finding if a sum exists, I also had to return the length of the largest sub-sequence that sums to K.

Coding Round 2

The second coding round also tested my data structure and algorithm skills:

1. The "Kth Largest Element in an Array" problem, with a variant where I needed to return the index of the element instead of the element's value itself.
2. A unique, non-LeetCode problem. I was tasked with designing a system to issue tokens from a 16-bit integer space. The core constraint was that once a token is returned, the smallest available token should be re-issued next. I also needed to consider and handle various edge cases.

System Design Round

This round involved two significant system design challenges:

1. Designing the entire end-to-end system for Instagram's video feed.
2. Designing the feed ranking system for Facebook, with a specific emphasis on the second-stage ranker component.

Behavioral Round

The behavioral interview covered common topics such as conflict resolution, handling situations requiring pivoting, and other leadership principles.

Outcome

After completing all rounds, I received feedback that I was downleveled to an E5 offer. However, as I had other strong opportunities in both tech and finance, I decided to pass on the offer from Meta.

Screening Rounds

The recruitment process for Meta began after a recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn. I'm currently employed as an SDE-2 at a MAANG company. The initial screening involved an online assessment (OA) where I tackled a problem that evolved across 4-5 stages, with new conditions added progressively. I managed to solve all but the final stage. The core of the problem was about designing a cache for a database, necessitating a strong understanding of maps and LRU implementation.

Following the OA, I participated in a 45-minute coding interview with a Meta engineer, during which I was asked two specific problems. I successfully solved both, though the first problem was unfamiliar to me, causing me to spend a significant amount of time on it. I later received feedback from the recruiter that I had marginally passed the screening, primarily because my OA score wasn't perfect and my coding performance was considered 'OK' rather than a 'strong' signal.

Main Interview Rounds

The main interview consisted of four distinct rounds: one dedicated to coding, another to AI-assisted coding, a behavioral assessment, and a product design challenge. While initially scheduled over four separate days, it was consolidated into two rounds per day, approximately 14-15 days after I cleared the screening.

1. Coding (45 min)

This round was quite similar to my second screening interview. I was presented with two problems and had 45 minutes to solve them. I managed to complete the first question within just 10 minutes, which afforded me ample time to tackle the second problem and explore various approaches. I felt I delivered a strong positive signal in this round.

2. AI Assisted Coding (60 min)

This round mirrored the first screening OA, but with the added element of a 'weak AI' to provide assistance. The interviewer had a pronounced accent, making communication somewhat challenging, and after about 30 minutes, they ceased direct communication entirely, instructing me to direct any questions to the AI. The simplified problem involved being given 16 random cards and needing to select 3 that summed to 15 (with Ace=1, Jack=10, Queen=11, King=12). Once a set of 3 was chosen, those cards would be replaced from the deck. The ultimate goal was to successfully perform this 12 times until all cards were dealt. I was tasked with writing a program to achieve this. The interview started with debugging a failing unit test, which I successfully completed. However, I was unable to solve the primary problem. I perceived this round as a strong negative signal.

3. Behavior Round (45 min)

This round comprised standard behavioral questions, with a notable emphasis on scenarios involving challenges or negative outcomes at Meta. For instance, I was asked about resolving conflicts with managers, convincing team members to support my initiatives, my proudest project, dealing with difficult co-workers, instances of changing direction mid-execution, my biggest weakness, and a time I introduced a bug into production and what I learned from it. Overall, I felt this round went quite well and constituted a positive signal.

4. Product Design (45 min)

I was tasked with designing a food delivery website. I approached the problem using conventional methods often discussed in interview preparation videos. The discussion delved deeply into specific areas such as geospatial indexing for location-based restaurant searches, utilizing Elasticsearch for text-based search functionalities, and implementing cron jobs for managing real-time delivery notifications. While I personally felt the round progressed effectively, the interviewer did not appear entirely satisfied, though they did not explicitly articulate any specific concerns despite my attempts to engage them. I rated this round as an 'Ok to positive' signal.

Outcome

Three days following the interviews, I received notification that I had not been selected for the role. The only feedback provided by the recruiter was that one of my rounds had received a negative rating, which I strongly suspect was the AI-assisted coding round. Despite my repeated requests, no direct feedback was provided for the other rounds.

Hey everyone, I recently finished my full interview loop with Meta and unfortunately got rejected at the end. Still, I wanted to share my full experience since posts like these really helped me during preparation.

My background includes an education from IIT Kanpur, working at a product-based startup, with 2.5+ years of full-time experience, plus 6 months + 2 months of internships.

Recruiter Reach-out (25th Sept)

A recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn, and we had a detailed conversation where she explained the role and expectations, the full hiring process, the elimination stage, timeline, interview structure, and prep tips.

The elimination stage consisted of three parts:

1. Live DSA Elimination Interview (Zoom): This was 45 minutes. I received two DSA questions and managed to solve both within ~20 minutes. These were Ocean View Buildings (a standard LeetCode problem) and a Pattern–Target Matching problem where repeated characters can be removed to match the pattern. The interviewer was nice.
2. Hard DSA Online Assessment: This one was genuinely tough. There were 4 questions, and I barely managed to finish them in time.
3. Behavioral Assessment: This had situational questions like “In this scenario, what would you do?” which I answered using a Likert scale (Strongly Agree / Agree / Neutral / Disagree / Strongly Disagree). I found it simple overall, but I'd highly recommend understanding Meta’s values beforehand, as it helps align your responses.

Two days later, I was told I cleared the elimination stage and could schedule the full loop. I booked my interviews from 27th–31st October 2025.

Full Interview Loop (4 Rounds)

Every round was 45 minutes, except the AI-enabled round which was 60 minutes. Each round also included 5 minutes for an intro and 5 minutes at the end to ask questions.

1️⃣ Round 1 — Behavioral (45 minutes)

This round consisted of standard Meta behavioral questions, including topics like a project I’m proud of, a conflict with a teammate, a time I disagreed with someone, a time I had to follow someone else’s opinion, and ownership and failures. The interviewer asked rapid follow-up questions, which made it harder to strictly follow the STAR framework, but overall, I felt I handled it fine. My self-verdict: Hire.

2️⃣ Round 2 — Product Architecture (45 minutes)

Since the role was full-stack, I got a Product Architecture round instead of classical System Design. The prompt was to Design an Online Food Delivery App. I followed my complete framework: clarifications, high-level architecture, entities, services, API design, functional + non-functional requirements, scalability + edge cases, and follow-up questions. This felt like my strongest round, and the interviewer seemed impressed. My self-verdict: Hire → Strong Hire.

3️⃣ Round 3 — AI-Enabled Coding Round (60 minutes)

This is a new Meta format, introduced around October 2025. I received a partially built game scenario and had to understand the existing codebase, fill in missing logic, and optimize a final strategy. The interviewer was very friendly and helpful. Since this format was new, I didn’t have much prior information, but I still felt I did well. My self-verdict: Leaning Hire → Hire.

4️⃣ Round 4 — Pure DSA (45 minutes)

This round had two coding problems: LRU Cache and a String manipulation problem to check if a string can be made palindrome after deleting certain characters. For both, I explained the brute force approach, then an optimized approach, wrote clean code, and covered edge cases. My self-verdict: Hire → Strong Hire.

Final Result ❌

I was honestly expecting a positive result based on how the interviews went… but after 10–12 days, I received the rejection email. They did not share any specific feedback, which would have been really great. It stung, because I felt I performed well in most rounds — but that’s how interviews go sometimes.

Let me know if you have any questions!

My Meta E4 Interview Experience

I recently interviewed with Meta for their Product role at the E4 level and wanted to share my experience across the phone screen and onsite rounds.

Before the phone interview, I completed two assessments:

• A coding assessment with 4 stages
• A work-style assessment

Phone Screen

1. Count number of 1s in a given subarray in a large array of 1s and 0s. I was given indices for the start and end of the subarray. I started with a simple linear approach, then optimized it to a prefix-sum solution: prefix[end] - prefix[start - 1]. Follow-ups included questions on handling digits 0–9 instead of binary, and how to handle cases like start > end.
2. Find Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree. I implemented the standard recursive LCA algorithm and walked through examples. I missed one edge case where p and q have the same value, and needed a small hint for the scenario where both references point to the same node.

Overall Phone Screen Feedback was positive: strong coding, clear communication, and fast implementation. Improvements were suggested in clarifying questions and edge-case coverage.

Onsite Rounds

Round 1

1. Find first 1 in a sorted binary matrix. I solved this problem cleanly.
2. Trapping Rain Water. I solved this problem cleanly.

Round 2 (Design Round)

I was asked to design a concert ticket booking service for a small scale (one venue, many concerts). I discussed requirements, user flows, API design, data model, and bottlenecks. I drove the conversation end-to-end, providing detailed but clear explanations, and moved quickly through the design choices. I also pushed back when needed to clarify assumptions.

Round 3

1. Valid Palindrome II.
2. Valid Word Abbreviation.

I solved both of these problems without any issues.

Round 4 (Behavioral)

This was a standard behavioral round with questions focused on handling ambiguity, conflict resolution, and using data to drive decisions. It was a straightforward conversation centered around my past experiences, demonstrating ownership, and highlighting collaborative efforts.

I recently had an onsite coding interview at Meta for the SWE Product role in the USA. The interview session included two non-AI coding challenges. The first question was a standard binary tree column traversal problem, which I found quite straightforward. The second problem was more involved: designing friend request logic for mythical creatures called centaurs, based on several age-related rules. I struggled a bit with this one and wasn't able to code up a fully working solution covering all the rules within the given time. However, I made sure to clearly communicate my thought process and approach to the interviewer, detailing how I would tackle the problem. I later revisited the problem myself and realized it's manageable if framed correctly.

My onsite interview process at Meta for a SWE Product role included an AI coding round, a non-AI coding round, a system design interview, and a behavioral interview. For the AI coding round, I was presented with a coderpad equipped with 'AI Assist' mode, offering lightweight foundation models. I chose Claude Haiku 3.5 and was given a codebase consisting of main.py, test.py, solve.py, utils.py, and a data/ directory.

My first task was to fix two failing unit tests in utils.py, which involved minor logic errors and debugging with print statements. The second task was to implement solve.py, a stubbed function designed to take a list of words and identify a subset meeting a specific property. I leveraged AI Assist to craft a good prompt, which helped me generate working code that passed the provided unit tests. However, my solution for this part was exponential time. When asked to optimize, I struggled to find a more efficient approach, later discovering from the interviewer that it was an NP-Complete problem. This was quite an unforgettable experience, highlighting the practicality of such rounds despite the challenging time complexity question.

I just got done with my first technical screen in Meta for a Mid-level Software Engineer position, specifically targeting Java roles. The interview involved two distinct data structure and algorithm questions. I felt prepared for both, and I'm looking forward to the next steps.

Company: Meta
Location: London
Position : Senior Security Engineer

1. Few Questions related to IAM - RBAC, ABAC
2. Check if a number is strobogrammatic

I was recently approached by an HR from Meta for a Software Engineer role. During the phone screen round, the interviewer asked me two coding questions. I believe I solved both of them correctly with proper code and logic. Despite my efforts, I unfortunately received a rejection for the Software Engineer role.

My interview journey with Meta began with a phone screen, where I was presented with LC 408 (Valid Word Abbreviation) and LC 791 (Custom Sort String). The onsite rounds followed. In Coding Round 1, I tackled LC 1650 (Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree III), where the interviewer specifically delved into the rationale behind the optimal space-efficient solution, and LC 1249 (Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses). Coding Round 2 involved a variation of LC 8 (String to Integer (atoi)) and a challenging custom problem: '0-1-2 BFS on a Grid' to find the minimum cost path. I initially approached it with BFS and a heap, but the interviewer pressed for a solution without a heap, which I couldn't provide within the time limit. The final round was a System Design interview, where I was asked to design a 1v1 online chess game along with a leaderboard.

Screening Round

My interview process began with a screening round, which featured two questions that I would classify as easy to medium difficulty.

Full Loop Interviews

Following the screening, I moved on to the full loop, which was structured as follows:

1. Behavioral Round

This round focused on my past experiences and how I handled various situations, typical of a behavioral interview.

2. DSA Round 1

In the first data structures and algorithms round, I was presented with two problems:

• One involved determining if a matrix represented as an array was a Toeplitz matrix.
• The other was a problem similar to finding the maximum consecutive ones with some allowed flips.

3. DSA Round 2

The second DSA round also had two questions:

• The first asked me to remove extra parentheses to make a string valid.
• The second was about finding the shortest path in a 1-0 matrix from the top-left to the bottom-right corner.

4. Design Round

The final round was a system design interview where I was asked to design WhatsApp, specifically emphasizing the use of API calls instead of websockets for communication.

My recent tech screen at Meta was quite an experience. The interviewer was incredibly supportive, guiding me throughout the session. Even though I had prepared extensively with the top 70-75 LeetCode questions, the problems presented were distinct. I initially explored a few approaches that didn't quite work out, but for the first question, I eventually proposed the correct strategy, which involved using prefix sums. The second question was also unique, not following the typical patterns of problems like 2sum or 3sum. Overall, I received a fair bit of assistance from the interviewer, leaving me uncertain about the final outcome, as I understand that naive solutions are generally not sufficient.

I went through a comprehensive onsite interview experience at Meta in Bangalore, India, which consisted of four rounds. The order of these rounds was flexible and depended entirely on panel availability.

Round 1: AI-Enabled Coding Interview (60 minutes) This round was quite unique. I was given an existing codebase, complete with .h and .cpp files, along with test files. The goal was to assess my problem-solving, code development and understanding, verification and debugging, and technical communication skills. It wasn't about using AI as a crutch, but rather as a tool to demonstrate my coding proficiency more efficiently and in a job-relevant manner. I had to run and execute code using existing data files and/or codebases to work through a coding problem. It felt very different from the standard coding interview format.

Round 2: DSA Round (45 minutes) This round presented two problems. The first problem involved determining if two given rectangles, specified by their coordinates, intersect. If they did, I was asked to return all points of intersection. This problem seemed straightforward initially, but I ended up wasting a significant amount of time on it. The second problem was quite vague and related to graph DFS. The interviewer initially asked me to implement two functions, but after I pressed for a lot of clarifying questions, he revealed that those functions were already implemented, and I only needed to implement a third function. By this point, only 7-8 minutes were left. He asked me to code whatever solution I could, and I managed to code the entire solution to his satisfaction. I realized how crucial it is in Meta interviews to proactively clarify the problem statement myself.

Round 3: Behavioral Round In this round, the interviewer focused on understanding how my skills and experience would benefit Meta and how I approach unfamiliar problems. Key areas of discussion included resolving conflict and embracing ambiguity. No specific coding or design problems were posed here.

Round 4: Product Architecture Round This round, which shouldn't be confused with a typical system design interview, challenged me to design privacy level settings for a user within the Facebook app. The settings included options like "Me," "Public," "Friends," and "Friends of Friends." I had to ask numerous clarifying questions to fully grasp the problem statement. I'm uncertain about my performance in this round, but I attempted to list all functional and non-functional requirements, sketch a high-level architecture diagram, identify key entities, and discuss API aspects. The interviewer rigorously questioned me on the database schema and entity relationships, particularly focusing on the "Friends of Friends" case and potential optimization techniques.

Overall, I found that the questions across all interview rounds were often presented in a very vague and open-ended manner, and candidates are clearly expected to proactively clarify them.

I recently completed my first round for a SWE II, Product role at Meta, for a US-based position. The interview itself was 45 minutes long, and I was expected to solve two problems. My interviewer was quite chill, and I had a good 5-10 minutes at the end to ask them about their experience working on the Brand Ads Team within Monetization. I felt good about my performance on the first question, as I achieved an optimal solution. However, for the second question, I only managed a working solution. I couldn't come up with a more optimal time or space complexity for the second problem, and I'm hoping my working solution is enough to move me forward in the process.

My interview journey with Meta started with a phone screen, which included both a coding and a behavioral segment. For coding, I tackled Merge Two Sorted Arrays and a variant of Time Based Key-Value Store. The interviewer for the latter asked me to implement a treemap from scratch, and I managed to build all core functionalities, excluding tree balancing due to time limits. The behavioral part focused on conflict resolution, with several follow-up questions.

The onsite interviews for the E6 level were quite comprehensive. I had two system design rounds: one for Designing a Price Tracking and Alerting System and another for Designing a Create and Search System for Posts. Unfortunately, I couldn't deep dive into the second system design problem as much as I would have liked.

My coding rounds were intense. In the first coding session, I worked on Count Nodes Equal to Average of Subtree and a variant of Minimum Window Substring, each with a couple of follow-up questions. The second coding round presented Nested List Weight Sum and Find Kth Smallest Element Amongst N Sorted Arrays. I struggled to get to the follow-up for the second problem due to time.

Finally, I had a behavioral interview with 7-8 questions covering aspects like scope, impact, and how I handle conflicts. Overall, I felt that most of my interviews went almost perfectly.

The outcome was a downlevel to E5, and I am now in the team matching phase.

I recently finished my Meta E5 interview process.

Screening

The screening round consisted of two coding problems:

1. Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses
2. Valid Palindrome II

Both were straightforward string problems, and my focus was on clean implementation and handling all edge cases effectively.

Onsite Rounds

Coding Round 1

In the first coding round, I tackled two problems:

1. Dot Product of Two Large Sparse Vectors: I discussed all possible approaches, including hash map and binary search. Due to time constraints, I implemented the hash map approach.
2. Left View and Right View of a Binary Tree: I successfully solved this problem using a Breadth-First Search (BFS) approach.

Although I managed to solve both problems within the allotted time, clearly explained the time and space complexity, and performed complete dry runs, I still have a weird feeling about this particular round.

Coding Round 2

The second coding round also had two problems:

1. Move all even numbers to the left (in-place): I used a two-pointer approach for this, as the order of elements didn't matter.
2. Basic Calculator II: I walked through both stack-based and an optimized single-pass solution. For the actual implementation, I opted for the without-stack approach for better clarity.

System Design (Infra-focused)

For the system design round, the prompt was to design LeetCode for 50,000 users. I took the lead throughout the discussion, clearly defining the functional and non-functional requirements, sketching out APIs, and detailing the architecture (API Gateway → Queue → Worker → Sandbox → Storage). We delved into aspects like async job handling, container orchestration, and fault recovery.

Cross-questions were also posed, such as "Why DynamoDB over SQL?" and "What happens if a container or worker node fails?" I thoroughly explained retry semantics using SQS and the node re-spawn behavior in detail.

Behavioral

The behavioral round consisted mostly of standard questions. While one of my answers didn’t come out as structured as I had intended, overall I felt this round went acceptably.

I had my onsite interview at Meta, which consisted of four challenging rounds.

• Round 1 focused on data structures and algorithms. I was asked to implement the left and right view of a binary tree, and then to merge three sorted arrays while also removing any duplicate elements.
• Round 2 was a behavioral round where I answered questions about my past experiences and how I handle various situations.
• Round 3 was a system design interview where I had to design a system for ad recommendations.
• Round 4 involved more coding, specifically implementing a basic calculator that handles only addition and multiplication, and then designing a data structure that supports insert, delete, update, and getRandom operations all in O(1) time.

I was able to code everything and dry-run several examples for each problem. I'm currently waiting for the final results.

I've been preparing on and off for over a year, constantly trying to get calls from leading companies. Finally, I received an interview invitation from Meta for a Software Engineer role, which felt like a significant breakthrough as it was the first FAANG company to reach out to me after numerous applications. I asked for three weeks to prepare and dedicated that time to solving around 150 Meta-tagged problems.

On the interview day, I faced two coding challenges. The first was 'Missing Elements in Sorted Array'. I managed to solve it, although I felt I struggled a bit with explaining my thought process. The second question was 'All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree'. I was genuinely happy to see this problem as I was quite familiar with it. I almost made a mistake but caught it during my dry run and corrected it. I left the interview feeling confident that I had performed well and would advance to the next round.

However, a few hours later, a crushing realization hit me: I had completely forgotten to implement a visited set in my BFS approach for the second problem. This oversight rendered my entire solution incorrect. The very next day, I received a rejection email. A small part of me had hoped for a different outcome, but it wasn't meant to be. This experience has left me feeling quite disheartened, especially after dedicating three weeks to intense preparation that now feels wasted. I also acknowledge my weaknesses in LLD/HLD, which have been factors in previous interview failures, and this latest rejection just adds to a streak of disappointments.

My interview process for the E5 (Prod) Engineer position at Meta in the U.S. involved two main stages: a phone screen and an onsite loop.

The phone screen included two coding problems:

• Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal
• Minimum Window Substring

• Coding Round 1: Buildings With an Ocean View, with a follow-up on handling views from two sides.
• Coding Round 2: A modified version of Insert Delete GetRandom O(1) - Duplicates allowed, where the remove() function wouldn't take a value, and the value to be removed had to be random.
• Coding Round 3: Power(x,n)
• Coding Round 4: Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses
• System Design: Design Netflix
• Behavioral: A standard behavioral questions round.

I recently had a phone screen for the Production Engineer role at Meta. The interview consisted of two main rounds. The coding round involved two questions. One was a difficult 'Battleship board variant' that I don't recall the exact details of, but it was beyond what I had practiced, requiring strong DFS/BFS skills. The second coding question asked me to write a program to read multiple files and identify common words, along with the files they appeared in. The troubleshooting round presented an open-ended scenario: given standard system metrics (I/O, disk, CPU), what additional information would I gather for a frequently crashing site? I felt I performed around 8/10 in coding and 10/10 in troubleshooting. However, the recruiter informed me that my performance wasn't satisfactory in either, which felt disheartening, as if they had already decided not to move forward.

I was initially approached by a recruiter and had a phone screen. Following that, I completed an online assessment which was cloud-based. I managed to progress through all four stages of the OA; although I didn't ace every hidden test in the final stage, my score was sufficient to move forward to the next round. The technical screen for the E4 level was my next step, which I successfully cleared. The interview revolved around two specific coding questions. I have a full onsite loop scheduled in the coming weeks.

My interview journey for an E4 role at Meta in London started with a behavioral round where I tackled standard questions, ensuring my answers were backed by real-life examples and could handle follow-up questions effectively.

The first coding round presented two problems. First, I was asked to find the Closest BST Value. After discussing BST properties, I provided and coded an optimal solution. The second question, Longest Continuous Subarray With Absolute Diff Less Than or Equal to Limit, was unexpected. I proposed a two-pointer approach, coded it, and dry-ran it. The interviewer seemed satisfied, but post-interview, I discovered the optimal solution involves two deques, which left me feeling a bit disheartened.

In the second coding round, the first problem was to find the Kth Largest Element in an Array. I initially described a brute-force solution and then optimized it using a min-heap. A follow-up explored how the approach would change with many reads and memory constraints. The second problem was Peak Element. I started with a brute-force approach and struggled slightly with explaining the binary search solution before coding the optimal one. A minor bug in my conditions was subtly hinted at by the interviewer during a follow-up.

My System Design round is scheduled for next week, and I will update once it's completed. Overall, the unexpected difficulty in the first coding round's second question has left me quite demotivated given Meta's expectations.

I had my E4 interview at Meta in London. The process started with a behavioral round, where I answered standard questions with follow-ups, ensuring to provide real-life examples.

My first coding round featured two problems. The first was on 'Closest BST Value'. I discussed various questions related to BSTs, then presented an optimal approach for this specific problem and successfully coded it. The second question, 'Longest Continuous Subarray With Absolute Diff Less Than or Equal to Limit', was completely unexpected. I hadn't seen it before, and it wasn't among the top 100 tagged problems. I proposed a two-pointer approach, explained it thoroughly, wrote the code, and dry-ran it. I even asked the interviewer twice if they were satisfied, and they confirmed yes. However, after the interview, I realized the optimal solution involves two deques, making me question why the interviewer didn't guide me, especially since we finished 5 minutes early. This particular question left me feeling quite discouraged, given Meta's high expectations.

The second coding round also had two questions. For 'Kth Largest Element', I initially presented a brute-force approach and then optimized it using a min-heap. The interviewer then asked a follow-up on how the approach would change for frequent reads with an in-memory array. The second question was 'Peak Element'. I started with a brute-force idea and then moved to the binary search approach, struggling a bit with the explanation. I coded the optimal solution, but there was a minor bug in my conditions, which the interviewer subtly hinted at during a follow-up.

My System Design round is scheduled for next week, so the overall process is still ongoing. The challenge with the second question in the first coding round has certainly made me reflect.

I recently went through the complete interview process for Meta. It began with an HR call, followed by an Online Assessment that covered both technical and behavioral aspects.

The technical screening involved a coding problem described as a 1D Candy Crush variation, for which a link to Max Consecutive Ones III was provided.

The full loop consisted of two intensive coding rounds. In the first coding round, I tackled 'Closest Value to Target in a BST' and Next Permutation. The second coding round presented Sum Root to Leaf Numbers and Simplify Path.

Following the coding rounds, I had a Product Design round where I was challenged to design the Netflix API. Finally, the Behavioral Round covered topics like my proudest project, a situation where I faced pushback, and my approach to unknown technical problems.

Phone Screen

My initial phone screen included two coding problems: 'Find local minima' and a 'Valid Palindrome variant.' I made a minor error on the first question, leading to an incorrect answer. Despite this, the interviewer was very gracious and passed me through, which I consider extremely lucky and humbling.

Coding 1

This was my weakest round. I was asked about 'insert-into-a-sorted-circular-linked-list' and 'vertical-order-traversal-of-a-binary-tree.' For the second problem, I had to correct a bug after the interviewer pointed it out. However, I managed to complete both problems within the allotted time. I felt this round was, at best, a 'Lean Hire.'

Coding 2

This was my strongest performance. I tackled 'nested-list-weight-sum' and a 'basic-calculator variant.' I demonstrated great communication, delivered an optimized solution, and had bug-free code. I felt confident this was a 'Strong Hire' round.

System Design

The main problem was designing 'Top K heavy hitters.' I addressed all aspects, but we ran out of time before I could dive deeper into one specific question. I also felt the interviewer might have veered off-topic, and I had to guide the discussion back. Overall, I thought this round was a 'Hire' or 'Lean Hire' for E5.

Behavioral

This round focused on Meta's standard Leadership Principles. The questions were very pointed, and I answered over 25 questions, including follow-ups, in 40 minutes. My examples were all relevant to E5/E6 scope and based on genuine experiences, which helped with the follow-up questions. I strongly believe in being honest in this round as interviewers can discern authenticity.

Overall, I initially expected a reject for E5 or a downlevel to E4 due to my performance in Coding-1 and my mixed feelings about System Design. However, the recruiter contacted me the very next day to confirm an IC5 offer and the next steps for team matching.

I recently had my phone screen at Meta and passed last week. I'm really glad to share my experience. My interviewer was incredibly nice and chill, which I believe really helped me out, especially when I fumbled a bit in places I shouldn't have. He didn't ask for many follow-ups or questions during my implementation, besides having me run through another example for each problem. I think I was able to pass mainly because my interviewer was cool and understanding.

I recently completed my PS screening round at Meta. The interviewer, a bit stern about my setup, asked me to remove my background blur and close all other applications. This initial hiccup unfortunately consumed the first five minutes of the interview. However, he quickly transitioned, providing his introduction and explaining the interview's structure before diving into the coding challenges.

The first problem involved balancing parentheses in a string. I began by verbally outlining my solution, touching upon a stack-based approach, and then proceeded to code it. I made sure to test with my own example and explain how I'd handle various corner cases. During a dry run, I spotted an error, which the interviewer kindly hinted at, allowing me to correct my solution effectively.

Next, I faced a vertical order traversal problem. Again, I started by verbally explaining my approach, even performing a mental traversal, before coding. My only minor misstep was including a sort that's often needed in LeetCode for same-row/column sorting but wasn't strictly required for their specific test case, which the interviewer gently corrected. I am now awaiting the outcome, expecting to hear back on Monday.

I had a recent interview experience at Meta for an IC4 position in London. The interview process consisted of a phone screen, followed by two coding rounds, a system design interview, and a behavioral interview. I am glad to share that I have received a mail today indicating that they are moving me to the team matching phase. It's a positive step forward, and I'm hopeful for the next stage.

My screening round with Meta involved tackling two distinct coding problems. The first one was 'Range Sum of BST', which felt like an easy-to-medium problem primarily focusing on binary search tree traversal. The second challenge was 'Expression Add Operators', a hard problem that required me to think about backtracking and string manipulation techniques. The problem statement for the second question was clearly articulated, asking to find all possible ways to insert binary operators (+, -) between digits in a string to reach a given target value.

I recently interviewed with Meta for an E5 position, participating in a phone screen located in the US. During the interview, I was presented with two coding challenges. The first problem involved finding the Lowest Common Ancestor in a binary tree (LCA III), and the second task was to group strings that are "shifted" versions of each other. I focused on discussing my approaches and implementing efficient solutions for both.

I recently completed the full-loop interview with Meta for the E6 level and wanted to share my experience with the LC community.

Screening Round
1. Subtree of Another Tree — Solved it correctly.
2. Insert intervals variant — Shared the algorithm to solve it, but couldn’t complete the full solution due to time limits. The interviewer seemed somewhat satisfied with my approach.

Coding Round 1
1. Variant of Basic Calculator II — Solved it using a stack and covered all edge cases. It could be solved using string split as well, but the stack solution looked cleaner to me.
2. Minimum Add to Make Parentheses Valid — I started with a stack-based solution, wrote the complete code, and covered edge cases. The interviewer asked me to optimize it, but I couldn’t think of the two-pointers greedy approach within the time limit.

Coding Round 2
1. Closest Binary Search Tree Value — Solved well with proper dry run and edge cases.
2. Variant of Random Pick with Weight — Took a few hints from the interviewer for this question and finally solved it with proper edge cases.

Behavioral Round
1. Tell me about a high-impact project with an aggressive deadline.
2. Have you ever had a conflict with a colleague?
3. Tell me about a time you influenced without formal authority.
4. Describe a time you took ownership beyond your scope.
5. Did you ever fail? What did you learn from it?
6. Did you receive any feedback from your manager, and how did you act on it?
7. Did you face any challenges handling cross-team requirements?
8. How have you helped your peers or juniors grow?
9. How did you convince your leads/managers to optimize a specific flow/process?
10. Additional follow-ups on these questions.

I felt I did well in this round, answering using the STAR pattern.

Product Architecture 1
1. Design Spotify —
I feel I could have done better here. I didn’t handle the deep dives and follow-ups well. I had a hectic day at the office, but that’s just an excuse.

Product Architecture 2
1. Design Dropbox —
I think I nailed this one. The interviewer was excellent.

Result
All the interviewers were really good, and I had a great learning experience. I prepared for only 3 weeks, focusing mostly on coding. For system design, I only prepared for a single day, which wasn’t sufficient. I heard from my recruiter that the feedback wasn’t positive, at least not for the level they were hiring for. I’ll be receiving detailed feedback next week.

I’ll work on the gaps, improve, and come back stronger.

Applied for an E4 position at Meta. The interview process had three rounds. The first round was coding, where I faced two questions: finding the longest palindromic substring and implementing array flattening. The second round was a system design question about creating an Instagram news feed, which required considering read/write patterns and data storage. The third round was behavioral, focusing on past accomplishments and learning experiences. The interviewer emphasized aligning answers with Meta's values like leadership and teamwork.

Hey folks, I just cleared the E5 interview with Meta. The process was intense but rewarding. I was given a series of coding and design challenges that tested my problem-solving skills and system design knowledge. The coding questions were a mix of algorithms and data structures, while the design questions required me to think about scalability and user experience. I felt confident in my answers and was happy to receive the offer.

Hi Everyone, I recently gave the Meta Screening round for the Application Engineer role. It was a 45 mins interview which started with 25 mins of Role specialization questions, followed by the DSA question, Leetcode 443, String Compression.

Round 1: Coding started with a Meeting Scheduler problem involving two-way pointers and arrays. Initially, I struggled to understand the problem but eventually sorted the input and considered boundary conditions, using merge sort and quick sort. The second question was Find the Duplicate Number, which I solved using the fast pointer method similar to linked-list cycle detection. I explained the approach and provided the optimal solution within 10 minutes.

Round 2: System Design focused on designing a Movie Review Aggregator. Since it related to my current work, I outlined the business and ML objectives, discussed feature engineering, and proposed a high-level design. The interviewer emphasized machine learning aspects, and I elaborated on model selection, loss functions, and evaluation metrics.

Round 3: Coding included Next Permutation and Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal. For the first, I traversed backward to find the first node smaller than subsequent nodes, then swapped and reversed the subarray. For the second, I used BFS with a hash map to track column positions.

Round 4: Behavioral questions covered managing priorities, resolving conflicts, and receiving feedback. I used the STAR method, focusing on team building and leadership. The interviewer was satisfied but asked about my preferred machine learning area.

Had a phone interview 1.https://leetcode.com/problems/swap-nodes-in-pairs/description/ 2.https://leetcode.com/problems/insert-delete-getrandom-o1/

I was able to solve both questions awaiting for reply

Hope this helps for other users

Hey y’all! Got another solution for another tagged Meta problem, LeetCode 2265 Count Nodes Equal to Average of Subtree, as well as its variant.

This one’s been asked quite a bit more lately and it’s tripped up a bunch of candidates, and understandably so: deducing postorder traversal and knowing how to manipulate it for optimization in 20 minutes is tricky.

The variant is this: what if you had to return a boolean whether every node in the binary tree is the average of its subtree?

Fyi I've not seen this asked a lot in phone screens but this is speculation from what I've been seeing.

Wishing everyone good luck on their interviews!

Position: E4
Location: London

Round Summary
Got 2 coding questions in my interview:

1. Valid Word Abbreviation
- Spent most of the time (~30 mins) on this one.
- Interviewer asked me to list all possible test cases — I gave several, but missed the case with a 0 in the abbreviation. He pointed it out, and I updated my code to handle it.
- Not sure if missing it initially will count against me.

2. Pow(x, n)
- This was given when very little time was left, so I was a bit nervous.
- I first explained the brute force approach, then moved on to the O(log n) optimized approach.
- Got slightly confused while discussing space complexity.

Coding Round 1

• Binary tree question on the lines of getting Left side view + right side view of the tree
• 2 pointer problem on strings called Internationalization(Meta tagged)

Coding Round 2

• Get path from entry 0,0 to exit gate 2-d array traversal problem
• View ocean array problem (Meta tagged)

Product Architecutre

• Online coding competition platform

Behavioural

• General/usual kind of questions

Updated: Passed.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-path-in-binary-matrix/description/
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring

Self-eval:
1. Gave the optimal solution and dry-run perfectly
2. Gave the optimal solution but only dry-run half of an example due to time constraint (Crazy to think that I was targeted for this question & just had 15 mins)

Verdict: 50-50 game.

Banking System // Meta-style Banking System Implementation with Cashback and Prioritized Processing

interface Transaction { timestamp: number; amount: number; }

class Account { id: string; balance: number; history: Transaction[]; cashback: Map<string, { amount: number; processedAt: number, status:"complete"|"in progress" }> = new Map();

constructor(id: string) { this.id = id; this.balance = 0; this.history = []; this.cashback=new Map(); } }

class BankingSystem { private accounts: Map<string, Account> = new Map(); private transactionId = 1;

createAccount(id: string): void { if (this.accounts.has(id)) throw new Error("Account already exists"); this.accounts.set(id, new Account(id)); }

deposit(id: string, amount: number, timestamp: number): void { this.processCashbacks(); const acc = this.getAccount(id); acc.balance += amount; acc.history.push({ timestamp, amount: acc.balance }); }

pay(fromId: string, toId: string, amount: number, timestamp: number): void { this.processCashbacks(fromId, timestamp); this.processCashbacks(toId, timestamp); const from = this.getAccount(fromId); const to = this.getAccount(toId); if (from.balance < amount) throw new Error("Insufficient funds");

const txId = "payment" + this.transactionId++;

from.balance -= amount;
to.balance += amount;

from.history.push({ timestamp, amount:from.balance });
to.history.push({ timestamp, amount: to.balance });

const cashbackAmount = Math.floor((amount * 0.02));
from.cashback.set(txId, { amount: cashbackAmount, processedAt: timestamp + 86400000, status:"IN progress" });

}

transfer(fromId: string, toId: string, amount: number, timestamp: number): void { this.pay(fromId, toId, amount, timestamp); }

getBalanceAt(id: string, timestamp: number, timeAt): number { this.processCashbacks(); const acc = this.getAccount(id); let balance = 0; for (const tx of acc.history) { //return balance of account } return tx.balance; }

paymentStatus(id: string, paymentId: number): 'pending' | 'complete' | 'none' { this.processCashbacks(); //return cashback status }

mergeAccounts(fromId: string, toId: string): void { this.processCashbacks(); const from = this.getAccount(fromId); const to = this.getAccount(toId);

to.balance += from.balance;
to.history.push(...from.history);

//move cashbacks too this.accounts.delete(fromId); }

topSpenders(n: number): string[] { this.processCashbacks(); const spendMap: Map<string, number> = new Map(); for (const [id, acc] of this.accounts) { let total = 0; for (const tx of acc.history) { if (tx.type === 'payment') total += tx.amount; } spendMap.set(id, total); } return Array.from(spendMap.entries()) .sort((a, b) => b[1] - a[1]) .slice(0, n) .map(([id]) => id); }

private getAccount(id: string): Account { const acc = this.accounts.get(id); if (!acc) throw new Error("Account not found"); return acc; }

private processCashbacks(accountId: string, timestamp: number): void {

const acc = this.getAccount(accountId);
for (const [txId, entry] of acc.cashback.entries()) {
  if (entry.processedAt <= timestamp) {
    acc.balance += entry.amount;
    acc.history.push({
      timestamp: timestamp,
      amount: acc.balance,
    });
  }
}

} }

Hey y'all, sharing a recent interview experience on behalf of anonymous. This ain't me but I hope these data points help. OP was asked the variants, not the OG - so, I linked the variant posts below.

Q1: LC199 Right Side View
Variant: what if you had to return both views, the left- and right side views? It was noted you can combine the two lists into one, rather than just using a singular list. So, there was no need to overly optimize here.

Q2: LC56 Merge Intervals
Variant: What if you had to merge two interval lists? The interviewer copied and pasted text that mentioned each interval list "containing intervals in ascending order. Merge them."
The interviewer had followed up with testcases for the candidate to go through.
...I can only imagine it was due to a lack of communication from the candidate's end. Or a lack of dry-running. Or if there were bug(s).

Q3: LC103 Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal
Variant: What if you had to return the order from right to left for the first level, then left to right, etc? It's the opposite than the OG problem.
There was time left so Q3 was given. Code was required.

---

I don't know information beyond this, other than the fact that the person heard back after 6 business days.

Good luck with your studies!

Screening Q1 given word 1 and word 2 return output baseball base : 4 landlord load : 0 hangover hanng : 4

Q2 minimum remove to make valid parenthesis

Full Loop:

Coding interview 1:

1. course schedule
2. given root, target k, print all nodes at kth distance from target node

Coding interview 2:

1. given matrix, do diagonal traversal
2. in sorted array find occurence of given word

System Design: Design auction in instagram.

Awaiting for res....

My interview journey at Meta for the E5 Infrastructure Engineer position began with a screening round. In this round, I encountered two coding problems. The first was a variant of 'Merge Sorted Arrays,' where the input sizes 'm' and 'n' were not explicitly provided, which I believe caused me to lose some points. The second coding question was a 'Random pointer' problem, which I handled as a standard instance.

Following the screening, I proceeded to the onsite loop. The System Design round focused on designing a system similar to Dropbox. I felt I could have elaborated more effectively on the file synchronization mechanism post-upload. Additionally, there was a discussion around 'Top K Heavy Hitters.'

My first Coding Interview session included two problems. One was a variant of 'Random Pick with Weight,' which I felt confident about, aligning with similar problems I'd practiced from @codingwithminmer's playlist. The second problem asked me to find the 'Highest Sum in a Subtree,' which could also contain negative values. I later realized I might have missed a detail regarding whether it was specifically a Binary Search Tree (BST).

The second Coding Interview also featured two questions. The first was another variant from the 'Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock' series, again something I had practiced. The second question, 'Counting nodes equal to average,' presented a true/false variant, which was a bit ambiguous.

Finally, the Behavioral round covered standard top K behavioral questions commonly found in other posts. Despite my efforts, I ultimately received a rejection for the role.

Coding round 1: Array problems (one is from leetcode meta tagged) Coding round 2: tree problem(leetcode meta tagged with variant), binary search prbolem(leetcode meta tagged) System Design: Auction System Behavioral: as ususal questions

Questions from Meta screening:

a) https://leetcode.com/problems/buildings-with-an-ocean-view/description/
b) Merge two lists having intervals. Lists are sorted by the first element of interval.

I did (a) well but wasn't able to fully code (b). I focussed on communicating my thought process well and the interviewer helped me in bringing back on track in (b).

Surprisingly, I got moved to the full-loop; though I am aware I need to step up my game like anything.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share my recent experience from the system design loop at Meta for a Senior Product Engineer (E5) role. I hope this helps others prepare, and it's my way of giving back to this amazing community that has helped me so much.

A special thanks to "hellointerview" for their amazing content, which was instrumental in helping me prepare.

First, I want to share a key observation from my interviews. This is just my take, so feel free to share your own experiences in the comments.

Observation: The Two-Round Interview for Leveling

I had two system design rounds, which seems to be a common practice when Meta is trying to level a candidate between two roles (e.g., Mid-level E4 vs. Senior E5). My theory is that candidates whose leveling is clear beforehand may only get one round. For senior roles, however, it seems they need more data points to make a decision.

My reasoning comes from the significant difference in difficulty and ambiguity between the two problems I was given.

• Round 1 (The E5 Test): This question was not a standard, standalone problem. It was a direct combination of two complex designs.
• Round 2 (The E4 Test): This was a more straightforward, medium-difficulty question: "Design LeetCode Competitions."

It felt strongly like the first interview was designed to test me at the E5 level, while the second established a baseline at the E4 level. This gives the hiring committee flexibility to down-level a candidate but still extend an offer if they don't meet all the senior-level criteria.

The Combined-Problem Question

The prompt for my senior-level interview was:
"Design a system like Instagram that also features a real-time 'Trending Hashtags' leaderboard. This leaderboard should show the top 10 hashtags being used globally in the last hour, ranked by frequency."

This problem combines news-feed generation (with its fan-out complexities) and real-time stream processing for Top K aggregation. The expectation was to cover the full design process (FRs, NFRs, Schema, APIs, HLD) and then deep-dive into the trade-offs at the integration points between the two systems.

I managed to get through most of the required steps and did deep dives on the biggest bottlenecks I identified. It wasn't possible to cover every detail, but the recruiter's feedback was positive. My take is that the interviewers know it's a hard problem and adjust their expectations; they seemed satisfied that I addressed the highest-priority NFRs and challenges.

Hello everyone,

Current TC : 57 LPA
YOE : ~6

Sharing my full loop interview experience at Meta.

• best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock
• group-shifted-strings

• valid-palindrome-ii
• vertical-order-traversal-of-a-binary-tree

• Users should be able to create an order for the food of their choice
• Users should be able to view the order details.
• The restaurant should be notified about the order and should be able to accept or reject it.
• Users should receive a notification upon order confirmation.
• After the order is confirmed, the system should notify delivery personnel and obtain acceptance from one of them.
• Users should be able to track the delivery person in real time.

Q1) Find the buildings that have an ocean view. A building has an ocean view if any part of the building can see the ocean without being obstructed by another building.

Input = Array of numbers that represent the height of buildings.

Output = Return the indexes of the buildings that have ocean view

Example Input: [4, 3, 2, 3, 1] Output: [0, 3, 4]

Q2) Given a 2D array, print out its elements in diagonal order as shown in the below image. https://imgur.com/Ib0VUPO Example Input:

1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9

My interview was around 2 weeks ago with Meta.

result: not selected

phone screen:

coding- battleship with returning coordinates

network- osi, tcp deep dive, bgp overview & basic troubleshooting of day to day issues

Initial Call

I got the initial screening call and was asked to schedule my phone screen ASAP. I scheduled it a month out from when I got the initial call, thinking I'd have enough time to get well practiced. Other things took priority so, as I've documented below, I only spent about ~21 hours of proper practicing over those intiial four weeks.

Phone Screen

Prep time: ~21 hours total

https://leetcode.com/problems/diameter-of-binary-tree
- Solved pretty quick, no issues. Got asked about the space complexity and I probably got it wrong.

https://leetcode.com/problems/the-maze
- Explained solution, did not have time to code it out (expected to fail at this point)

Surprise, two days later I got the email that I was invited to the full loop. Again, I booked this loop out as far as possible (about four weeks) to try and get more time to study. I spent ~40 hours grinding LC over these four weeks but it was just not enough.

Full Loop

Prep time: ~40 hours total

Product Architecture

Design Online Judge (Like Leetcode)
- Think I did well here, followed helloInterview's process and was able to get into two deep-dives once the initial implementation was designed.

Coding Challenges

https://leetcode.com/problems/range-sum-of-bst
- I hadn't seen this problem before but understand tree traversal well so was a non-issue. Solved this one pretty fast, no problem. I gave $$O(N)$$ complexity considering the worst case, but I got asked about the best case, which I couldn't remember off the top of my head for binary trees- it's $$O(logN)$$ btw

And a variant of:
https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals
- Somehow despite all the prep I've done, haven't seen this problem or variants and didn't prep for it, so basically froze trying to think of an implementation. Nerves always get to me in these interviews. Found the problem on LC, and looked at the solution and am kicking myself at how striaghtforward it is.

I pretty much gave up after this- stopped prep, stopped practicing, stopped reviewing anything, and just figured the rest of my loop will be a good practice interview set.

For scheduling reasons, I had a full week between my Day 1 and 2 interviews. I could have spent this time sharpening up but I was discouraged and so I just essentially gave up.

Day 2

Behavioral

Most folks skip over these but I thought they might be valuable. I think I did okay on them but my morale was super low so my responses were pretty low effort.
- Tell me about a result you achieved for your team that you are most proud of.
- Can you tell me about the most difficult working relationship that you’ve had?
- Can you tell me about a time where you faced pushback regarding your approach on a project?
- Can you tell me about a time where you needed to act quickly on something but didn’t have a clear idea of how to proceed?
- Can you tell me about a time where you faced a significant setback that forced you to re-prioritize your work?
- Can you tell me about a time a peer or manager gave you specific, actionable feedback for improvement?
- Can you tell me about feedback you’ve given to a more junior engineer or peer?

Coding

https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/
- Forgot the recursive solution and just fumbled around something super messy until the interviewer stopped me for the next problem.

https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-word-abbreviation/
- Managed to get a solution written and started testing it, after the interview I found a few bugs in my code. Seriously ready to just kms at this point.

Product Architecture

Design CamelCameCamel
- Again, probably did okay here, got through the initial design and into a couple of deep dives. Honestly I was just ready for the whole thing to be over at this point.

In summary, I'm glad it's finally over. I definitely didn't invest enough time in prep, and I knew that going into the loop, so set myself up to fail. I've got a newborn, a full-time job, and I'm in the middle of getting my Masters degree, so there was really no way I could devote enough time to this. Not feeling too bad about it, definitely not expecting an offer.

Good luck out there, see you in about a year when I get my yearly callback.

Phone round:

• Custom Sort String
• Find peak element
• 15 mins behavioral (as I was interviewing for E6) The downgraded to E5 after this.

Round 1:

• Remove 1 character to find palindrome
• Shortest path in binary matrix

Round 2:

• A project that didnt go well
• A project that went well
• How do you deal with difficult co-worker
• A feedback was given and you took action on it

Round 3: Interviewer had a quality assurance person with him who was off-camera.

• Merge k sorted lists (LC hard)
• Variant of merge intervals; Detect most overlapping numbers

This one didnt go well. They conducted in a different way and wanted me to come up with the optimized solution for LC hard. Didnt let me write the code at all for the first one, while asking for Time, space complexity on every possible solution suggestion.

Round 4: Instragram reel recommendation

Hey y'all, sharing a recent interview experience on behalf of anonymous. This ain't me but I hope these data points help. OP was asked the variants, not the OG - so, I linked the variant posts below.

I don't know information beyond this, but if you have pressing questions, I can ask anonymous.

Good luck with your studies!

Hey everyone,

I recently went through the full Meta interview loop and got rejected in the end, wanted to share my experience for anyone preparing, especially if you’re grinding LeetCode from scratch like I did.

Screening:

LC408 — Valid Word Abbreviation (with a follow-up: “What if there are two abbreviations over one word?”)

LC528 — Random Pick with Weight

Onsite / Full Loop:
Product Architecture:

I got a Dropbox-style system design. Went well, similar to the classic hello-interview Dropbox question.

Coding Interview 1:

LC227 — Basic Calculator II: I knew the optimal solution and explained it, but got stuck validating my code during the interview. The interviewer helped a bit. I missed an edge case in an if but fixed it immediately.

LC670 — Maximum Swap: Said the optimal approach, coded it with a few minor bugs but nothing major, I validated & fixed on the go. I used a map to store digit indices and looped from 9→0 to find swaps. The interviewer pushed me to optimize further. I think he wanted an early exit once no bigger digit exists. Eventually did it, went fine.

Coding Interview 2:

LC88 — Merge Two Sorted Arrays: Explained optimal, wrote code. The interviewer asked “did you miss anything?” in a confusing way — it threw me off, I added unnecessary code, then removed it when I realized. Overall okay.

LC138 — Copy List with Random Pointer: Said the 2-pass hash map approach. The interviewer pushed me to optimize. I didn’t understand at first, but he wanted the in-place single-pass version where you interleave new nodes into the original list. Eventually got it.

Behavioral:

Project I’m proud of

Dealing with ambiguity

Growth mindset

A boss I had issues with (or something similar)
Felt fine here.

Product Architecture (final):
Surprised me — it was about a catalog with items and images. There’s an external blackbox to validate items aren’t weapons/illegal. I gave a high-level API design, explained image uploads with presigned URLs, but didn’t reach non-functionals due to time.

Result:
Rejected. No detailed feedback — just “strengthen technical skills across the board.”

Hey y’all, got a solution for a variant of LC691 Stickers to Spell Word. Now, Meta will never ask you the OG problem but rather, this prompt: what if you only had one sticker? How many stickers do you minimally need to recreate the poster?

Although there are a few edge cases, this actually simplifies the original problem. Wishing everyone good luck on their interviews!

Check it out (or not!):

Unknown Leetcode, Stickers to Create Poster (Link)

Reference to all of the Meta Variants, Playlists & Unknowns: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6615244/meta-variant-compilation-by-codingwithmi-0pm7/

Hey y’all, Summer and I did another mock phone screen interview, this time going over two Leetcode Hards: LC76 Minimum Window Substring and LC317 Shortest Distance From All Buildings. IMO an interview format was the most efficient way to cover these two problems, both of which will be rephrased in your actual interview:

As you’ll see, LC76’s input will be the following:

Input:
sentence = ['is', 'one', 'ok', 'you', 'the', 'frog', 'ok', 'one', 'the', 'you', 'is', 'not', 'frog']
words = ['is', 'you', 'frog']
Output: "you is not frog"

For LC317, it’ll be reworded where you’re trying to place the optimal well in a 2D matrix where a T represents a tree and an H represents a house.

Check it out (or not!):

Leetcode 76 & Leetcode 317 (Link)

As always, good luck on your interviews!!

Reference to all of the Meta Variants, Playlists & Unknowns: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6615244/meta-variant-compilation-by-codingwithmi-0pm7/

Please note the coderpad.io settings and tools utilized in the video is exactly what you should expect in a Meta interview.

And yes, being asked 2 Hard LC in a phone screen is unlikely but possible - another combo I see is LC987 and LC317. Or others with LC827, or LC282 (but rarely).

Giving back to the community where I got all the resources from

Phone Screen
1) Diagonal Traversal of matrix (LC 498) :
Similar to LC 498, but didn't need to flip the direction of traversal for each diagonal (so easier version of leetcode question).
2) LC 408 variant.(was asked the leetcode question first and after the approach was provided, he went with the followup which was varaiant)
both word and abbr can be patterns.

Solved first question and gave approach to the follow up for second but didnt have time to finish the question.

Got selected for the onsite rounds

DSA1
1) vertical order traversal (LC 314)
2) K Closest points to origin LC 973

Solved both the questions

DSA2
1) Some max K question (classic miHeap type question, dont remmeber exactly)
2) a variant of two sum

Solved both the questions

System Design
1) Adclick aggregator

Behavioural
Dont remember the questions but the usual behavioural questions.

Got offered E4 (downlevelled) position. Team matching pending but can take time.

Hi, I am giving back to the community by sharing full loop questions.

System Desgin: desgin place recommender near user

Behavioral interview: normal questions; examples of success, what you learn from them ..etc

• coding interview 1 (mid, hard):

  • weighted sum of nested list LC339
  • minimum flood level to remove all paths: similar to LC778

• coding interview 2 (mid, mid):

  • departure and return flights , given two arrays find the cheapest round flight
  • merge intervals LC986

Hey y'all, sharing a recent interview experience on behalf of anonymous. This ain't me but I hope these data points help!

Q1: LC199 Binary Tree Right Side View
Variant: what if you had to return the left and right side views?
It was noted that BFS was used and accepted.

Q2: LC1047 Remove All Adjacent Duplicates
Variant: 1D Candy Crush.

Q3: LC346 Moving Average from a Data Stream
Variant: The input is given upfront so use a rolling window.
I could be misinterpreting here and the candidate could've been asked the OG (in which a queue is the solution) but I've almost never seen the latter asked.

Q4: LC23 Merge K Sorted Lists
Variant: It's a list of integers. A heap was used instead of the divide-and-conquer, and it was acceptable.

Behavioral: It was questions around handling conflict, demonstrating leadership, mentorship experiences and "What project are you most proud of?"

System Design: Design Proximity Server

I don't know information beyond this, but if you have pressing questions, I can ask anonymous!

Good luck with your studies!

Location : London

Got 2 questions :

1.Minimum flight cost.

2.Given a mouse with 2 APIs in a maze. Design an algorithm to find a cheese in the maze using only the 2 given APIs shown below :

hasCheese()

move()


I was able to solve the 1st question completely.

Ran out of time for 2nd question.


Unfortunately, could not make it to next round.

Would like give a shout out to Mimner for his work in explaining all the different Meta variants.

Hello everyone,

I recently completed my full loop interview rounds with Meta. I have not heard from the recruiter yet. My first coding round very nice -- told the optimised solutions for both of the questions asked but for the second coding round in second question, I was able to code up the brute force solution but could not tell the optimized solution despite of hints given.

For system design interview, I was able to answer all the cross questions asked but I feel, I could not cover a lot of deep dives I had thought of covering in 40 minutes.

Behaviorial round went pretty good.

Recruiter has not yet informed about the level. I am seven years of experience total. The level should be either E4/E5.

What could be my chances of getting through?

Update:
It was a reject :( majorly due to coding rounds. The feedback for system and behavoirial rounds was a HIRE call.

Sharing the questions here:

Phone Screen:
Q1) Return T/F if a given string is a number.
Example: "123", "123.", ".123", "1.2.3"
Q2) Find the valley in a given array -- Return the index which is strictly less than its neighbours

Coding1:
Q1) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69995292/algorithm-question-finding-the-cheapest-flight
Q2) https://leetcode.com/problems/mice-and-cheese/

Coding2:
Q1) http://leetcode.com/problems/lowest-common-ancestor-of-a-binary-tree-iii/description/
Q2) https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-path-in-binary-matrix/description/ (Expected tc: O(n^2))

System Design:
Design a system similar to Leetcode

All the best everyone!

Location: US

Got two questions.

Q1. Diameter of Binary Tree. [medium]
Q2. Non Tagged question but similar to Kth Smallest Element in a Sorted Matrix [medium]

Verdict: Moved to Onsite

Hope it is useful. All the best!

Meta Phone screening

1- count all paranthese you need to remove to make a valid parenthese. I solved with loop and counting open and closed parentheses.

2- LC236 find lowest common ancestor of two nodes in binary tree. I solved it with map - TC O(N) SC O(N) ).

update -- in fact the question I got was similar to LC160 because they gave the nodes as input. --

as a follow up I discussed the optimal solution with O(1) SC

the idea being to determine the depth of the nodes and then move pointers accordingly. the interviewer did not ask me to code it.

feedback:

• I was nervous so I named the functions to solve the problems func .. feedback told me the naming was bad
• in problem 2 interviewer asked me if i want to do a dry run and if everything ok, I said yeah it is ok, then he mentioned an edge case and asked me what would be the output then I realized that i had a bug in the condition

I moved to full loop

Q1: https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-sorted-array/description/
Follow-up: Can you merge starting from the beginning of each array instead of from the end? Yes/no - explain with examples.
Also, the size of the arrays were not given.

Q2: https://leetcode.com/problems/group-shifted-strings/description/?envType=company&envId=facebook&favoriteSlug=facebook-thirty-days
No time for follow-ups

Verdict: Selected for on-site.

Here's the list of questions I was asked during my Meta E5 Interview Process.

Screening:

1. Average of all the sub arrays of Length K
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/copy-list-with-random-pointer/description/

DSA-1