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.
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