My Meta Interview Experience (Mid-Level [E4] | USA | Reject After Follow Up)

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon10 months ago

Interviews

Meta phone screen: Asked two questions directly from the top 50 LC tagged (Array Sum and Tree BFS categories). Aced both questions and was notified the next day that I had moved on to onsite.

Onsite prep: This would be my first system design interview and I didn't want to mess it up. I booked multiple Hello Interview mocks and though they weren't cheap, I was satisfied with the overall quality, feedback, and accurate grading.

Meta onsite 1 (coding): This round tripped me up and I was disappointed given how much I had prepared 🙁

First question: Tree BFS (got optimal runtime, but not optimal space)
Second question: Multiple binary searches on an array (did not get the optimal solution, couldn't find a question to tag)
Immediately after the round, I realized my mistakes on both questions but couldn't go back and change it 🙁

Meta onsite 2 (behavioral): No surprise questions and I answered them to the best of my capacity stressing my ability to work with other people specifically

Meta onsite 3 (system design): The question is similar to Post Search

I had trouble understanding the interviewer and threw all my system design knowledge out there. There wasn't much discussion but I did mention concepts such as inverted index, sharding, replication, hot partitions, cache invalidations

Meta onsite 4 (coding)

This was my strongest performance and I was proud of myself after this round. I solved both questions optimally
- Question 1: Number Verification (LC Hard)
- Question 2: Tree BFS
Surprisingly (given my other rounds) I received a call the next day saying that they wanted to give me a follow-up coding round

Meta onsite 5 (follow-up coding)

I fumbled this round, which was especially heartbreaking. The questions were related to Palindrome (LC Hard) and Grid DFS
Same day I was notified that I was rejected 🙁

Eye-opening experience overall and I know I have much more work to pass next time around. Total time: ~1.5 months

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55 Comments

Discussion

(5 comments)

10
Rahul Pandey
•Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
10 months ago
This is so helpful, thank you for sharing! I'll continue the trend and share a few questions I got asked as an Android dev way back in 2017:

Design the Facebook news feed with 3 story types (diving in RecyclerView)

How does AsyncTask work? Explain threading in Android.

How would you sort an array of size N where you know the array consists of K sub-lists, each of which are sorted?

Explain a time when you had a technical disagreement, and how did you resolve it?

Implement prefix search across Strings with regex.
8
Jurabek Azizkhujaev
•Senior Software Engineer at VW
10 months ago
We need more content like this that shares interview experiences in Taro.
- 0
  Alex Chiou
  •Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
  10 months ago
  We're working on this right now! It will be one of our first (and hopefully biggest) launches in 2025.
4
Alex Chiou
•Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
10 months ago
Thanks for sharing and sorry to hear that you didn't make it in the end. You'll get them next time! LeetCode hard problems are particularly annoying as for a lot of them, you either know the answer or you don't 🫤

For future data structures and algorithms help, check this out (it covers how FAANG rounds are graded): Master The Data Structures And Algorithms Interview

For other folks who are in the Meta loop, I recommend this: "How does the Meta interview work?"

I shared my full Meta interview experience here: How Alex Got Into Meta With 0 Prior LeetCode Experience
2
Jaideep Singh
•Senior Software Engineer
10 months ago
Hey for what it's worth, I had the same experience as you. Except I had 2 follow ups: 1 coding and 1 system design. Fumbled in coding. They said to try again in a year.