Meta E4 Interview experience
Summary
I successfully navigated a rigorous E4 interview process at Meta in the USA, which initially included five rounds and later extended to seven. Despite initial skepticism about a system design round, I ultimately received an offer for an E4 role after a follow-up interview and team matching.
Full Experience
I completed my full-loop E4 interviews at Meta in the USA. Initially, there were five rounds after a phone screen: two coding, two system design, and one behavioral round.
Coding Round 1
- Simplify Path
- Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
No variants were asked for these problems.
Coding Round 2
- Merge Intervals
- Binary Tree Right Side View
Again, no variants were asked.
System Design Round 1
This round involved designing a system similar to Instagram, covering standard requirements.
System Design Round 2
I was tasked with designing a price notification system, similar to camelcamelcamel. The interviewer was quite particular about requirements, leading to a significant discussion at the start. We debated requirements like whether we would ingest initial seed product IDs or crawl all product pages, or only rely on products provided by subscribers. The interviewer remained silent for a good portion of the discussion, only bringing up scalability issues (like email, updating prices), storing historical price differences, email batching, and queuing jobs for workers in the last 10 minutes. I felt a bit skeptical about this round as I hadn't encountered this specific problem before, and I was unsure if I gave the right signals, though I later verified the design online.
Behavioral Round
I faced 6-7 standard behavioral questions, many of which I recognized from past interview experiences. The interviewer was friendly and asked several follow-up questions.
Overall, most rounds went as expected, except for System Design Round 2, which left me with some doubts. I was waiting for results, hoping for good news.
Update 1
They scheduled an additional system design round, making it a total of three system design rounds and seven rounds overall, as they felt some signals were missing. This follow-up interview was quite stressful; the interviewer was very interventionist, and I didn't feel I could fully convey my solutions. I wasn't very hopeful about the outcome after this round.
Update 2
Today, I received an update that they are extending an offer after team matching is complete! I am incredibly grateful to the community for all the support and information that helped me through this process.
Interview Questions (6)
The problem asks to simplify an absolute path to a file or directory in a Unix-style file system.
Given an array of prices, I needed to find the maximum profit by buying and selling the stock once. No variants were asked.
Given a collection of intervals, I was asked to merge all overlapping intervals.
I needed to return the values of the nodes you can see from the right side of a binary tree, ordered from top to bottom.
I was asked to design a system similar to Instagram, covering standard requirements like uploading photos/videos, feed generation, user profiles, followers, and basic infrastructure components.
I was tasked with designing a price notification system similar to camelcamelcamel. The discussion involved defining requirements, such as whether we would get initial seed product IDs/names, crawl through all product pages, or only use products provided by subscribers. We also covered scalability issues (e.g., sending emails, updating prices efficiently), storing historical price differences, email batching, and queuing jobs for workers.