I was interviewed for an M2 EM role for the Menlo Park office. A recruiter approached me on LinkedIn. I had a short call with her, followed by an initial interview which had two steps: one focusing on people management and leadership, and the other being technical (mostly system design, also some technical discussions relevant to my background).

The virtual onsite happened five weeks later. The interview sequence was: System Design, Project Retro, People/Org, Technical Project Deepdive, Coding, and XFN partnerships.

#GivingBack

• Story preparation is underrated and an absolute must. You need a clean, short story for any circumstance. Even if you can come up with this on the fly, it's nearly impossible to communicate all key messages in a short time if you aren't prepared with the takeaways you need to communicate.
• I used the Educative Grokking guide to brush up on System Design, but it was honestly insufficient for the depth the interviewers went into. We also went into a few networking concepts I wasn't expecting. I thought I bombed this round but apparently I didn't.
• I also watched a couple of recorded interviews on YouTube. It's low ROI but still recommended if you have time. I got one to two insights from each 30-40 minute video I watched.
• The highest-value thing I did was mock interviews on Prepfully. I was quite doubtful going in, as they don't show reviews or anything, but I was matched with clearly experienced interviewers. $100-$150 was nothing compared to the value they added in an hour. I received sharp, pointed advice from each one. It also provided good practice of the interview environment, although I was already interviewing at multiple places, so this was less needed. The only thing I would do differently is that I practiced System Design with EMs, but I found the ones with their Sr. level engineers harder than the ones their EMs conducted.

Design a video upload and sharing app.

I spent a lot of time on the API and permissions. I also spent some time on the networking and security aspects, which I wasn't expecting at all.

Tell me about a time you had to deliver unpleasant news to someone reporting to you.

What's your approach to 1-1s? How does your discussion change between individual contributors and managers? (I got asked exactly this question in my Prepfully mock, by the way).

Tell me about the most technically complex project you've managed. What made it difficult? How did you resource your team?

How do you balance autonomy and direction? Tell us about a time you had to move the team in a different direction than what they wanted.

What do you think are the components to maintain healthy cross-functional dependencies?

A senior leader from a different org challenged your approach to a specific problem your team is working on during a weekly standup. What would you do next?