I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I didn't end up getting an offer.
Due to NDA I cannot explicitly write down the questions, but look at the last 150 questions in Glassdoor and CareerCup and you'll do fine (I did fine in the coding rounds, get to that in a bit).
Usual advice: Do a lot of white-boarding for questions and be ready to talk extensively about your projects and architecture and design.
Screening Round:
I applied to Facebook by getting connected to a recruiter through a colleague and friend. The process started in Seattle and I opted for a in-person onsite interview for the screening round (they have this option for locals in Seattle/California).
The interview went well i.e. I figured out how to solve the question in optimal time and space complexity. I made some mistakes here and there while writing the solution down but the interviewer didn't seem to mind. Contrary to what I had heard, he wasn't too anal about syntax (also helped that I write in C# he wasn't very familiar with it)
Onsite Round:
I received an email from the recruiter that they wanted to move forward and call me onsite. I was like, cool!
I took around 2 weeks to prepare and also tried to do design questions. I felt a bit under prepared around design and tried to make up for it in the last few weeks by watching videos around cloud architecture (and open source stuff like Hadoop, Kafka and Storm).
Onsite was pretty straightforward. First round was a career fit/discussion and I did pretty well (I think). It was mainly some behavioral questions and a lot diagrams around the architecture in my current and previous projects.
Second round was the one that I messed up.
The question was around designing an existing Facebook feature (as a hint, think about the various add-dons you see on FB and instagram like Chat, Search, latest friend related news or popular links). When you really dig into designing this feature, its quite complicated and requires a reasonable amount of knowledge around distributed data storage etc. etc.
You need to nail this round to get into Facebook (in my personal opinion). I'm guessing they will adjust their expectations based on your years of experience.
There was a lunch which was informal and two more coding rounds where they asked questions that were very similar to the ones I had practiced. I made some silly mistakes here and there but again (due to practice) came up with optimal time/space complexity answers.
Got my result exactly one week from the my onsite date. No offer. But learnt a lot.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
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
