Meta Banglore Rejection

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Banglore
April 20, 20253 reads

Summary

I recently completed my loop interview with Meta for a Bangalore location, covering coding, ML design, and behavioral questions. While I was ultimately rejected, I am sharing the process and specific questions to help others prepare.

Full Experience

I have recently completed my loop interview with Meta for Banglore location. I am sharing below the interview process and questions (if it helps).

Interview Process:

  1. Phone Screen: Leetcode Tagged Questions (1 Medium , 1 Easy)
  2. Loop ML Interview
    1. 2 X Coding Interview (2 Questions each - 2XMedium)
    2. 1 X ML Design
    3. 1 X Behavioural

Interview Questions:

Coding Questions (Top-100 Meta Tagged LC Questions):

  • 1091: Shortest Path in Binary Matrix (Asked to find the route and not just the size)
  • 1762: Buildings With an Ocean View
  • 314: Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal
  • 1004: Max Consecutive Ones III
  • 215: Kth Largest Element in an Array

PS: This include the questions from Phone screen and Loop Interview. I don't recall the 6th question.

Behavioural Interview

  • Recent Project and my role
  • What is the area of self-growth (and how this has impacted in past)
  • Scenario or tough relationship / conflict at work
  • The are some project specific question

ML Design

  • Design a System to detect harmful ads (viz. arms selling, etc) and take it down

Interview Questions (9)

Q1
Shortest Path in Binary Matrix (with route)
Data Structures & Algorithms

Given a binary matrix, find the shortest clear path from the top-left cell to the bottom-right cell. The path must only include cells with value 0, and all adjacent cells in the path must be 8-directionally connected. The problem specifically asked to find the route itself, not just the length of the shortest path.

Q2
Buildings With an Ocean View
Data Structures & Algorithms

You are given an array heights of positive integers, where heights[i] represents the height of the i-th building. You want to find all the buildings that have an ocean view. A building has an ocean view if all the buildings to its right are strictly shorter. Return a list of the indices of buildings that have an ocean view, sorted in increasing order.

Q3
Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal
Data Structures & Algorithms

Given the root of a binary tree, return the vertical order traversal of its nodes' values. (i.e., from top to bottom, column by column). If two nodes are in the same row and same column, the order should be from left to right.

Q4
Max Consecutive Ones III
Data Structures & Algorithms

Given a binary array nums and an integer k, return the maximum number of consecutive 1's in the array if you can flip at most k 0's.

Q5
Kth Largest Element in an Array
Data Structures & Algorithms

Given an integer array nums and an integer k, return the k-th largest element in the array. Note that it is the k-th largest element in the sorted order, not the k-th distinct element.

Q6
Discuss a recent project and your role
Behavioral

Describe a recent project you worked on and elaborate on your specific contributions and responsibilities within that project.

Q7
Area of self-growth and its impact
Behavioral

Identify an area where you have focused on self-growth and explain how developing in this area has impacted your past work or experiences.

Q8
Handling tough relationships or conflicts at work
Behavioral

Describe a scenario where you faced a tough relationship or conflict with a colleague or team member at work, and how you handled it.

Q9
Design a System to Detect Harmful Ads
System Design

Design an end-to-end system capable of detecting harmful advertisements (e.g., those selling arms) and subsequently taking them down. Discuss aspects such as data ingestion, feature engineering, model selection, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.

Preparation Tips

Takeaway and Suggestions:

  1. Instead of asking folks for referral, directly apply into their website. Its highly likely you'll hear back
  2. I don't have good feeling of Meta recruiters, I need to follow-up multiple times before they share the application update
  3. The Meta gives very less time for interview preparation. I was given 2 weeks for Phone Screen and 2.5 weeks for ML-Loop. I feel I fall short of time to practice for ML Design and Behavioural.
  4. The behavioral questions will be there to judge some Meta values. Its not just important to keep the stories but being able to narrate well when different questions being asked. Prepare well.
  5. For ML Design, the question is very specific (similar thing happen with me at Google). I studied typical question the designing recommendation system and all but question is simple and narrowed down. The expectation is very high to cover things in quite a lot detail and touch all the aspects of Model Development , Data / Feature Engineering (Data Sampling and imbalance set is very import), Model Evaluation. Prepare well with whiteboard and try giving 1-2 mock with and EM or Staff MLE/Applied-Scientist to prepare well.
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