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Meta interview notes, page 137 of 238

FAANG / Big Tech

Most of these Meta write-ups come from Software Engineers (1,194), then Data Scientists (489) and Product Managers (453). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (1,190), the product sense round (466), the system design round (255) and the behavioral / leadership round (205).

2377 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Meta PM interview with a single product design question about building a lending library for communities. Pretty open-ended, which sounds fun until you're sitting there trying to figure out what angle they actually want.
  • Design a lending library for communities.

“I spent the first minute or two just trying to nail down what 'community' even means here.”

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Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta ML engineer screen, one coding problem the whole time. Pretty standard weighted random sampling question but the binary search angle is easy to fumble if you haven't seen it before.
  • Given an array of positive integer weights, implement a function that randomly picks an index with probability proportional to each element's weight relative to the total sum.

“The naive approach of expanding weights into a giant array works but kills you on memory.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Meta system design round for a software engineer role, and it went sideways fast. I came in prepared for a large-scale distributed problem and spent half an hour going down that road before the interviewer revealed he just wanted a simple single-machine solution for a small school. The recruiter later confirmed this round failed because I never properly nailed down requirements up front.
  • Design a ticket booking system.

“I walked in with a fully memorized large-scale design and just started reciting it.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta SWE coding screen, one algorithmic question on strings. Pretty standard stuff but the O(n) constraint is where they actually care about your answer.
  • Given a string of lowercase letters, determine whether it can become a palindrome by removing at most one character. Must run in O(n) time.

“Two pointer approach gets you there.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta SWE coding round, one question about finding the smallest positive integer made up entirely of odd digits. Pretty short session, nothing crazy.
  • Given an integer, find the smallest positive integer that is composed only of odd digits.

“Took me a second to even parse what they were asking.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral prep for a Meta software engineer loop. Six prompts covering the usual territory: projects, conflict, speed vs. quality tradeoffs, leadership, cross-team work, and feedback. No outcome info shared.
  • What's a project you're proud of? Walk me through the scope and complexity.
  • Tell me about a conflict you had to resolve.
  • Describe a time you moved quickly on something without sacrificing engineering quality.
  • Give an example of when you stepped up to lead an important project without being asked.
  • Tell me about a time you worked across teams or functions to get something done.
  • What's a piece of constructive feedback a manager gave you, and what did you do with it?

“This is the one I actually felt okay about.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta phone screen for a software engineer role. One coding question, pretty focused on edge case handling more than the algorithm itself.
  • Given a list of bus departure times as HH:MM strings and a current time string, return how many minutes have passed since the most recent bus that departed strictly before the current time. If no bus departed before the current time, return -1. A bus departing exactly at the current time does not count.

“I jumped straight to sorting and converting everything to minutes, which was fine.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta SWE technical phone screen, one coding problem the whole time. Pretty focused session, just the sparse vector design question with some follow-ups on complexity and data representation.
  • Design a SparseVector class that stores integer vectors efficiently when most values are zero, and implement a dot product method that works efficiently between two such vectors. The vector length can be up to 10^5 but only a few positions are non-zero. Also explain your data representation, how it handles different sparsity patterns between two vectors, and analyze the time and space complexity of both construction and the dot product.

“My first instinct was a hashmap from index to value, which is fine, but then they asked what happens when one vector is dense and the other is sparse.”

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Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta ML engineer coding round, got a linked list problem that looked straightforward until the random pointer showed up. They wanted two full solutions with complexity analysis, not just one.
  • Given a linked list where each node has both a next pointer and a random pointer (pointing to any node or null), implement a deep copy of the list. They want two approaches: one using a hashmap for O(n) space, and another using O(1) extra space by interleaving copy nodes into the original list before separating them out. Walk through the complexity and trade-offs of both.

“The hashmap version I got out pretty cleanly.”

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Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta DS interview, ads-ranking focus. The whole session was basically one long case study about a messy A/B result where almost every metric pointed a different direction. Dense and uncomfortable in a good way.
  • You're running an ads-ranking A/B test and get mixed results: CTR is down 3%, CPM is up 6%, impressions per user up 1.5% (not significant), RPM up 4%, and purchase conversion on click down slightly but not significant. Build a ship/hold decision framework using a north star metric and guardrails around user experience and integrity.
  • Quantify the net revenue change per 1 million impressions and decompose the drivers using a waterfall breakdown across CPM, CTR, and conversion rate.
  • What additional diagnostics would you run to make sure the results aren't artifacts, like Simpson's paradox from shifts in supply mix, bid landscape, user segments, or ad pacing?
  • You need to present these results to the CFO on a single slide. What visuals do you include and what's the headline?

“This is where I spent most of my mental energy.”

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