Career Advice About Meta

Hi! I got a call from a Meta recruiter a few weeks ago, and I scheduled my phone screen for this coming week. However, my Practice Screening Interview did not go very well and uncovered certain gaps in my preparation.

Should I tell my Meta recruiter that I am not prepared enough for my actual screening interview next week and ask for a postponement? Or should I just go ahead with my interview and potentially squander a good opportunity?

In hindsight, I think I should have only scheduled the interview after (a) having done a decent amount of preparation, and (b) having assessed myself through some mock interviews. That's certainly a learning for the future, but I am not sure how I should navigate the current situation I am in.

Any advice, suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!

I just did but we can also collect questions here that I'll answer afterward.

Work history

I recently joined Databricks as a Senior Director of Engineering. Most of my career has involved Machine Learning, and I've managed teams ranging from 2 to 200 engineers/research scientists.

Previously, I was the Head of FB Reels and Video Recommendations (Director of Engineering) at Meta, from 2019 - 2023. Before that, I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead working at Google in Mountain View. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from Penn State, and my publications during that time have accumulated almost 9K academic citations.

Some questions I've heard:

• How Fair is Performance Evaluation for Tech ICs vs Managers?
• Can you give some examples of effective communication? What channels are used, level of abstraction, tone, etc?
• Any advice for a new grad to progress faster in their career?
• What are interviews even like for Director+?

Other

I've started writing detailed notes in blogs titled TLDR0. Slightly cheesy, but it stands for Tech Leadership - Direct, Respectful, Zero Ego. See the full details on my .

• Substack:
• Medium:

This post is part AMA and part request for your insights.

I’m currently developing a Taro course for Q1 of 2025, focused on navigating the transition to a career in machine learning. If this topic resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts:

1. What are the most pressing questions or concerns you have about making this transition?

2. What is your current role or background (e.g., Software Engineer, Data Engineer, SRE/PE, Data Scientist, etc.)?

About Me:

I’ve transitioned from Software Engineer to Data Scientist to Machine Learning Engineer over the course of my 14 year career. I’ve been an MLE for 10 years, with experience at Adobe, Twitter, Meta, and as Head of MLOps at a Series B startup.

Thank you!

Update: Thank you for all the questions, keep them coming. I put together a video with a quick outline of the process as I generally recommend it, this is a high level overview and more practical things are coming in a Taro course early next year.

Hey everyone, I tried searching online about this but couldn't find much info. I did virtual onsites with Meta this week and the recruiter called me asking if I knew anyone at Meta that could be used as an internal reference.

Is this generally a good sign and does this mean I'm going to the HC?

I recently interviewed with Meta for a E4 level SDE role and was given a hire decision but for E3 level instead. However since my recruiter is unaware of any E3 roles currently, they are unable to move forward with my application. I reached out to other recruiters but with no response. What could I do in this situation? Kindly advise.

Hey everyone!

I just passed all my Meta interviews for E4 in infra! and now I am onto team matching!
However, my recruiter wants me to try out for the monetization/ads org, but I've heard a lot of bad rumors about that org, notably that work life balance is awful and stress is really high. (Blind seems to especially dislike it haha)

Does anyone have real experience with that org here? Are the rumors true?

I don't mind a little bit of extra stress and doing some overtime from time to time as long as it's not overtaking my personal life.
For instance at Amazon (Gen AI) there were months where I was doing 80h+ per week non stop and that's the number one reason why I would like to leave tbh.

This is only the fast track option that my recruiter is offering me tho, I might still be able to get into the normal team matching pipeline afterwards too.

Anyways, thanks in advance! :)

I'm a new E4, so I obviously have promotion on my mind. I have a good amount of experience coming into Meta (~5 YOE), so I want to move more aggressively with this promotion. If I work 40-45 hours per work with very good work ethic, what's a reasonable target to hit for the E5 promo?

I've seen advices here in Taro that seniors should make themselves very much replaceable so that when this senior is away, someone is able to cover for them and the team could do well, which makes sense.

I thought the fact that people found the advice to be helpful, shows that making yourself replaceable isn't something that's very intuitive the first time. Like if someone didn't read the advice, they probably wouldn't have optimized for that.

I'm not quite senior yet but just curious to understand the situation (and people) better - was this thinking assumes that the amount of scope is in hyper-growth phase? Are there cases where it isn't really applicable / optimal for them to do so (and so they don't make themselves replaceable, and still do well) - then wouldn't they just continue doing it and we can't really blame them? I feel it's rare that people would change their behavior unless they really understand why.

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to a promotion at this level—it requires significant, consistent contributions that demonstrate your readiness to operate at a higher level of responsibility and impact. And I understand that it might not be easy on those levels, but most of the things described in the official documentation are pretty intense. Is there an easier path to get to the top by doing things smarter and not harder? For instance, there are things that people could do in other companies for bonus points like organizing hike for the team, building Movember type of volunteering event or soccer tournament for the org?

How about the following examples?

Mentorship and Team Development:

Actively mentor junior engineers and contribute to team development. This can include leading internal workshops, contributing to onboarding processes, or providing regular, constructive feedback to peers.

Community and Culture Contribution:

Contribute to the company's engineering culture and community. This can involve contributing to open-source projects, improving internal tools, writing engineering blogs, or participating in company-sponsored volunteer events.

Started at Meta London as a mid-level engineer back in 2020. Put in everything I had, but stayed stuck at the same level despite trying for promotion every cycle. Made it through several re-orgs and manager changes, always thinking "next time will be different."

Never quite found my groove there. I know I'm a solid engineer, but between team circumstances and a poor fit with the product side, I couldn't land those "exceeds expectations" ratings needed for promotion. Now they're laying me off with a "below expectations" rating, which might block me from ever working at Meta again.

This hits hard. Really hard. I poured years of my life into this job, burned through my health both mentally and physically. Now I'm watching everyone talk about this massive AI revolution coming for tech jobs, while London tech salaries are already pretty rough, and I've just lost my position at one of the few companies that paid well here.

I've landed another job to keep the lights on (again, I can code), but it's clearly not somewhere I'll grow much. Being in my 30s and having to rebuild from scratch is scary enough - add in the AI uncertainty and it feels even worse. That "below expectations" rating from Meta feels like a brand I can't shake off.

How do you bounce back when you've had a shot at the big leagues and it didn't work out? When you have to start over but you're not fresh out of college anymore? Some days it feels like everyone's judging me for not making it.

Looking for any advice from folks who've been through something similar or found their way and succeeded even better after a major career setback.

Preparation: Standard top 100 LC problems + Infra System Design Problems + Behavioral problems (STAR)

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 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: (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

• 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: (LC Hard)
  • Question 2:
• 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

I joined Meta very recently, so I'm in bootcamp. However, the company just announced a mass hiring freeze, so teams aren't taking in bootcampers at all effectively (there are very few exceptions). It's not clear when this freeze will end. Teams are still giving bootcampers tasks as they understand that we're pretty much "free" labor.

This is such a weird situation, and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. I like Meta as a company a lot, but I'm unsure how to make the best of this situation. Any advice?

I received a verbal offer from Meta for the Android role and I'm in a team matching phase. Recently team matching has been a lot of struggle and could take weeks or maybe months. Last year a lot of hiring managers posted on LinkedIn about hiring for roles and I did exchange a conversation with them. Is it wise to ask the hiring manager on LinkedIn about open roles in their org and then telling my recruiter about it or I should go with a team that the recruiter helps me to connect with?

Hey folks,

I’ve been on my current team for almost 1.5 years now. My hope is to get a promotion sometime this year which might require a higher performance review (Exceeds Expectations). But if I get an average performance review (Meets All), does it make sense for me to roll the dice and switch to a different team in the hopes of faster growth there?

I know there are significant costs to switching teams, and I want to make a well-informed decision if I do decide to switch teams internally.

Meta recruiters request references of people you have worked with before who are current employees of Meta before submitting feedback file to review committee.

My question is what & how much impact does providing these references have on your application, candidacy and the ultimate outcome of the interview process.

Does it hurt your chances to not be able to provide these one or more of these references?

In my effort to grow my scope as an engineer (and get promoted), I’ve constantly hit the same weak spot - not “working through others” enough.

I’m always happy to identify problems and solve them, but as a relatively inexperienced engineer compared to the rest of my team, I feel uncomfortable pushing work onto others, as I often am not sure my ideas will even be fruitful.

This issue is exacerbated by the fact that my team skews very senior and I don’t feel comfortable/qualified working through them.

How should I approach this problem?

Hi, I have my first team match call with a hiring manager this week. I am E4 level. I have compiled a list of questions to ask to try and demonstrate that I am willing to come in and work hard to contribute to the team's success. Would love some feedback:

1. What are some past projects that E4 engineers have worked on?
2. What is the team distribution, everyone's level, and how do people interact with each other?
3. What are the top 3 traits you look for in a candidate to join and be successful to contribute to your team?
4. What do you think I specifically would be working on at the start?
5. What are the specific expectations for my role/level during onboarding / ramp up? How long is ramp up? What are the expectations after ramp up?
6. How does the team celebrate success?

And please feel free to add any questions you think would be helpful to ask!

Thanks in advance!