I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2015
Interview
Phone Screen 45 min duration in total, the interviewer said a little bit about himself and went straight to a technical question. No background questions. The interview process went as expected, no surprises. The interviewer seemed to be a nice guy.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a sequence of numbers (34128) and an input map such as a dial pad on a phone (2->[a,b,c], 3->[d,e,f], 4->[g,h,i]) write an algorithm to return all possible words from the sequence.
E.g. Input: 232
Output: [ada, adb, adc, aea, aeb, aec, afa, afb, afc, bda, bdb, bdc, bea, beb, bec, bfa, bfb, bfc, cda, cdb, cdc, cea, ceb, cec, cfa, cfb, cfc]
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.
