I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Oct 2015
Interview
Standard facebook interview process. I already had an offer from another big company and told the recruiter. He went about the process really fast. 1 phone interview. 4 technical onsite interviews. (3 coding and 1 system design). Very school like questions. Could answer everything except the system design. I could not connect with the interviewer which I feel is important for design questions and he was not verbose enough to explain the basic requirements of the system.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a web crawler with fixed set of resources. (design)
2. Serialize/deserialize graph. 3. Check if tree is a mirror image. (Left and right is same)
Took about a month altogether, which felt longer given the intensity of the process. Kicked off with a technical screening, followed by two rigorous coding interviews. The DSA question on binary tree vertical order traversal hit me hard at first, but then I recognized the prompt instantly — I had just worked through something similar on PracHub. The final round was focused on system design, and while I ended up receiving an offer, I ultimately declined it. Overall, a challenging experience that definitely sharpened my skills.
1 leetcode med, 1 leetcode hard. make sure you know your DSA and leetcode questions. I wasn't able to get an offer bc i didnt complete the second question. Got a reply 2 days later saying they would move on
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.