I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Apr 2013
Interview
An internal recruiter contacted me out of the blue by Linkedin and email. We scheduled a phone call. Talked about my experience and education and then about available positions at Facebook. He then invited me to come onsite for a short screening interview first. I requested a couple of weeks to prepare for the interview. He was perfectly ok with that and even sent me some links to preparation materials.
Instead of a phone screen, I had a short 1:1 interview for 45 minutes onsite. Mostly coding on whiteboard and a little time set aside for questions about the company.
A week after that, four 1:1 interviews. Two coding interviews. One "manager" interview: mostly talking about past projects and future ambitions. One system design interview - you basically have to describe how you would design a given system without going into too much detail.
Received a call from recruiter next day. He said that I will have to come for one more interview. So a week after I had another series of two interviews, one coding and one manager.
I received an offer two days after the last interview.
During the whole process, the company was very flexible about scheduling interviews. Everything happens really fast if you want it, or you can take your time to prepare.
Recruiter was very nice and supportive, as were people at FB in general. Some interviewers did not talk much and some were more willing to discuss, but all were very polite.
Coding questions involve basic data structures like trees, combinatorial problems and sometimes a relatively simple dynamic programming problem. They are not too hard but you have to do them quickly and explain everything clearly. Understanding of Big-O is a must!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the most challenging issues in your work?
Took about a month from start to finish, which felt longer than I expected. After a couple of initial phone screenings, I faced a challenging technical round focused on system design. It was during this round that I was asked to describe overcoming a major career challenge. Interestingly, I had just reviewed a similar framework on PracHub, which helped me articulate my thoughts clearly. Overall, I appreciated the depth of the process and ended up accepting the offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe Overcoming a Major Challenge in Your Career
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
