I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Nov 2024
Interview
Initial recruitement screen to gauge logistics and lightly peruse your background and interest.
First Technical round comprised of two leetcode medium difficulty problems under a time constraint of roughly 40 minutes for both. The interviewers may give hints to guide you, but too many hints might signal that you’re not meeting expectations.
Preparation Tips:
Familiarize yourself with the LeetCode 75 or 150 problems, focusing on medium-to-hard difficulty.
Practice coding in a pressure environment and explaining your approach as you go.
I didn't make it past the intial technical but here's an overview:
Q1 Focus: Optimization skills and problem-solving efficiency.
Q2 Focus: Ability to design and utilize custom data structures while demonstrating a deep understanding of algorithm complexity and performance trade-offs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Array Problem to assess medium difficulty Algo knowledge:
The problem involves testing whether you can optimize an
𝑂(𝑛^2) time complexity algorithm into an 𝑂(𝑛) solution. This typically requires identifying a more efficient approach, such as using hash maps, sliding windows, or prefix sums, depending on the context.
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
