I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Apr 2012
Interview
Consists of 1 phone interview, 4 1:1 face to face interviews and 1 follow-up phone interview. The recruiter told me that they are concerned of my system design skills so the gave me another shot after the on-site interview, after that, he told me I did well but they decided to interview me one more time on system design, but two days later he called me again and cancelled the 2nd follow-up interview. I was a little bit upset as they promised another interview but all I can do is move on.
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.
