A Facebook recruiter reached out to me in December to see if I would be interested in interviewing, based on my LinkedIn profile. The initial conversation was pleasant, and the recruiter was helpful in explaining the process.

About two months later, I had an initial 45-minute phone screen/interview with an existing engineering manager. The recruiter provides all the necessary materials to prepare and informs you of the types of questions you need to have answers for. They follow the typical “tell me about a time when you had to...” format.

The recruiter followed up within a couple of days to say they wanted to move on to the full-day interviews. Due to COVID-19, I had to reschedule multiple times, which wasn’t an issue.

The main set of interviews consisted of six 45-minute sessions with different interviewers.

• One session is focused on your history.
• One session is focused on programming skills, which included the standard algorithm-type questions for which a quick Google search will provide plenty of examples (like sliding window, memoization, etc.).
• Two sessions are focused on design, where you walk through designing a theoretical system that scales to Facebook/Instagram levels of users.
• Two sessions are focused on soft skills and managerial style.

All interviewers were on time and pleasant. Interviews are back-to-back with a 45-minute break for lunch. The interviews are done over a video app as there are currently no on-site interviews.

Design a real-time comment system for under a Facebook post which may have millions of concurrent active users.