Meta E5 MLE - full round
Summary
I interviewed for an E6 MLE position at Meta, which was later downgraded to E5. The interview process included a phone screen, two data structures and algorithms rounds, a behavioral round, and a system design round focused on Instagram reel recommendations. My third round, involving a Merge K Sorted Lists variant, did not go well.
Full Experience
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
Interview Questions (12)
Custom Sort String
Find peak element
15 minutes of behavioral questions were asked, as I was interviewing for an E6 role.
Given a string, determine if it can be a palindrome by removing at most one character.
Shortest path in binary matrix
Describe a project that didn't go well.
Describe a project that went well.
How do you deal with difficult co-workers?
Describe a situation where you were given feedback and took action on it.
Merge k sorted lists.
A variant of the merge intervals problem, focused on detecting the most overlapping numbers.
Design a system for Instagram reel recommendation.