Applied via referral. The recruiter reached out pretty quickly, honestly one of the smoother processes I've had.

First was the recruiter phone screen. It was mostly background, why Meta, and if I knew what the role really meant (managing engineers across different crafts, career growth, xfn collaboration, etc.).

Then came the initial call with another EM, about 45 minutes. It covered people management, technical design, and motivation.

Onsite was the real deal – 5 rounds in one day, exhausting!

• Two system design/architecture rounds (think designing a real-time commenting system or how to tweak Newsfeed and measure success).
• One project retrospective (deep dive into a technically hard project you drove, what tradeoffs you made, how you scaled).
• One coding round (LeetCode medium type, e.g., Product of Array Except Self).
• One people + xfn management round (toughest part, honestly… questions like how do you deal with underperformers or how you keep difficult stakeholders aligned).

Honestly, the interviewers were fair but expected structured answers and clear leadership signals.

Prep-wise, I'd say Grokking System Design and LeetCode mediums for coding. A couple of mocks on Prepfully also helped me refine the people management part (those really make or break you at EM level).

Overall, a long process but supportive recruiters. It felt like they actually want you to succeed if you show breadth + depth and sound authentic.

Design a real-time commenting system. The focus was scaling and metrics.