I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta in May 2012
Interview
1) Recruiter contacted me over Linkedin
2) I answered some questions using email.
3) Short non-technical interview with the recruiter focusing on experience, education, projects etc.
4) Phone interview with coding over the internet.
5) 4 On-site interviews one after another. They were actually conducted over Skype Video calls to save time before h1b visa allotment runs out. Out of these four interviews 2 were coding interviews, 1 - design/performance/scale and 1 - cultural.
I'm especially happy with the way recruiter handled everything and the speed of the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Data structure for numbers that supports 2 operations: insert and get_median.
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.
