I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2012
Interview
A recruiter has contacted me through linked-in, asked whether I'll be interested to work for them, then had a talk about why would I like to work for them and I replied: that I would like to work with the best engineers.
Afterward I had a phone interview with some engineer, asked me to write binary search, when I finished, he asked me to write binary search on a shifted array (10 20 1 2 3 4). Wrote that and then asked me to find the offset (2) in log n. I guess I did that ok and then I was invited to onsite interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I had 4 consecutive interviews: first one was a general talk about my experience, second was to write a json beautifer, third was to design their newsfeed, and last was to write a program that prints all subsets of size k of a given set with n integers.
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.
