I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I got the opportunity through internal referral.
I passed an technical phone screening and was invited to an on-site. I had 5 interviews in total. Two coding, two system design, one with manager (on PhD research + a quick coding exercise).
The technical questions were not too difficult, but I was unprepared for the system design problems. One of the interviewers kept walking around in the room and was really distracting and annoying. I couldn't focus on solving the problem and didn't do well in that session.
The interviewing schedule was not the best. I was scheduled to have lunch at 2pm PST, but considering I'm from a couple time zones east of PST, I was already way too hungry to have lunch at that time. Perhaps a low blood sugar level also contributed to my impaired thinking abilities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Signed NDA. Distributed system design problems were out of my expectation as I do not claim any experience in that area nor was I interviewing with any positions related to that area.
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.
I applied online. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
It's honestly striaght from leetcode tagged
There are no surprises if you do tagged you would be good and do well.
System design is much harder. Would recommend using hello interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design Twitter and consider if it was suddenly an extremely low latency env
Grateful doesn't even begin to describe how I feel about landing this role. The interview loop was smooth and friendly. They kicked things off with a technical round where I faced a DSA question about verifying an alien dictionary. Lucky for me, the time I'd spent on PracHub paid off, as it had the same type of problem just days before. After that, I had a system design discussion and a behavioral interview. Everything felt very collaborative, and by the end, I received an offer that I was thrilled to accept.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a list of words written in an alien language and the order of letters in that language's alphabet, determine whether the words are sorted lexicographically (Verifying an Alien Dictionary). Walk through the comparison approach using a character-to-index map, the O(C) time complexity where C is total characters, and how you'd extend it to handle words with mixed-case letters or words containing characters outside the given alphabet.