I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in Dec 2014
Interview
1. I was contacted by a Facebook recruiter on LinkedIn.
2. She arranged a coding phone screen. It was about an hour long, and assessed programming & algorithmic problem solving skills.
3. After I passed the phone screen, I was invited to an onsite interview, which was about 6 hours long. Each session lasted about 45 minutes. Five sessions involved programming questions on dynamic programming, data structures, system design, algorithmic complexity. One session was almost purely behavioral, even though I was applying for a software engineering position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Dynamic programming questions that were pretty standard yet tricky.
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
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.
