Meta E5 what are my chances ?
Summary
I recently completed my Meta E5 interview, which included a screening round, two coding rounds, a system design round focused on infrastructure, and a behavioral round. Despite solving most problems and thoroughly discussing the system design, I have a mixed feeling about the overall outcome.
Full Experience
I recently finished my Meta E5 interview process.
Screening
The screening round consisted of two coding problems:
- Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses
- 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:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
Interview Questions (7)
This was a straightforward string problem, focusing on clean implementation and handling edge cases.
This was a straightforward string problem, focusing on clean implementation and handling edge cases.
I explained all possible approaches (hash map vs. binary search) and ended up implementing the hash map approach due to time constraints.
I was able to solve it using BFS.
I solved this problem using a two-pointer approach, noting that the order of numbers didn’t matter.
I walked through both stack-based and optimized single-pass solutions, and implemented the optimized version without a stack for clarity.
I led the conversation end-to-end, clearly defining functional and non-functional requirements, APIs, and the architecture (API Gateway → Queue → Worker → Sandbox → Storage). We also discussed async job handling, container orchestration, and fault recovery.