I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
The process consisted of multiple stages that took several months. First was a phone call with their in-house recruiter. Next was an optional practice interview (which was just like a regular screening interview). Next was the actual screening interview. If you pass the screening interview, you get moved on to the full-loop interview process. Mine consisted of two technical interviews, one behavior interview, and one API design interview (if I remember correctly). The entire interview process took place remotely (I forget which video meeting service was used).
After my full-loop interview, it took over six weeks to finally receive a rejection. The wait was intense.
The entire process took almost exactly 4 months.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about a time you had a disagreement with someone and how you resolved it.
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.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
The interview felt more straightforward than I anticipated for a well-known tech giant. After a recruiter screen, I faced a technical round that included a DSA question about finding the lowest common ancestor in a binary tree. I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the exact problem had popped up in the algorithm practice section on PracHub during my prep. Ultimately, the experience was decent, but I chose to decline the offer as it didn’t align with my current goals.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes in the tree.