I applied through university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
Solved their online puzzle, got contacted by campus recruiter, scheduled phone interview, went on-site for 2nd round interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected, I solved all the problems but I think I was too slow on the first one, which goes like:
Given an array of numbers, they are arranged so that the a[0] is in the 1st bucket, a[1]a[2] are in the 2nd bucket, a[3]a[4]a[5] is in the 3rd bucket and so on. The question is then: given a number, you need to return if it is in any bucket or not.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
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
