Meta E4 Interview Experience | Seattle, USA
Summary
I had a full loop interview for a Meta E4 infrastructure position in Seattle, which included a phone screen and a virtual on-site with coding, system design, and behavioral rounds. I was able to solve most coding problems optimally, but I believe I messed up the system design round, leading to a rejection. Despite the outcome, it was a good learning experience.
Full Experience
I recently had a full loop of Meta E4 infrastructure position for the Seattle office. I'm a backend engineer with 5+ YOE working in another big tech.
Phone screen:
- https://leetcode.com/problems/clone-binary-tree-with-random-pointer/description/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-vertical-order-traversal/description/
I passed the phone screen as I had already solved both problems before. I got a recruiter call the next day to schedule a virtual on-site. I scheduled on-site 3 weeks after the phone screen. My strategy remained the same, to study recently asked Meta questions, I aimed at covering at least 100 questions. However, I was not able to do so due to my current workload.
Onsite
- Interview 1
- https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/description/ a variant of two sum, where inputs are pairs instead of just numbers
- https://leetcode.com/problems/basic-calculator-ii/description/ variant of basic calculator where division was not required.
- Interview 2 System design interview, I was asked to design a system that can run code, like developers write the code and send it to the system and the system gives the output. Like AWS Lambda or LeetCode code runner. I followed the steps for hellointerviewdotcom but I think I messed up this round badly.
- Interview 3 Behavior interviews, I got like 6 or 7 questions standard behavior questions, I don't quite remember them, but there were those like give me an example of a time you had a conflict with a coworker, give me an example of a time you failed, give me an example of a time you took a decision without telling your manager and so on.
- Interview 4
- https://leetcode.com/problems/find-peak-element/description/ variant of this where we find minimum element and there could be duplicate values.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/subarray-sum-equals-k/description -- exactly the same
I think I got fairly easy questions and I was able to solve all 4 questions optimally with minimal hint, but ended up getting rejected which I believe is due to system design, but it was a good learning experience. For coding questions, I still highly believe that one can pass Meta interview with just 50 recently asked questions the trick is they ask variants and the variants sometimes are tricky.
Interview Questions (8)
Design a system that can run code, similar to how developers write code and send it to the system to get output. Examples include AWS Lambda or a LeetCode code runner.
Standard behavioral questions were asked. Examples include: 'Give me an example of a time you had a conflict with a coworker?', 'Give me an example of a time you failed?', and 'Give me an example of a time you took a decision without telling your manager?'.
Preparation Tips
For the phone screen, I only did 50 recently asked Meta questions as preparation. My strategy remained the same for the on-site, aiming at covering at least 100 questions, though I was unable to due to my current workload. I leveraged codingwithminmer YouTube channel sometime while prepping, noting that its videos are lengthy and might be difficult to cover if time is limited.