Meta·Data Scientist·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy
Jun 2026
Meta DS interview with a meaty product case about ad ranking. The whole thing was one big open-ended question that kept branching into metrics, experimentation, and stakeholder tradeoffs. Felt less like a structured interview and more like a live product review with someone who already knew the answer.
- Meta is thinking about boosting the ranking of ads that lead users to an in-app Shop experience compared to ads that send users to an external website. Walk through whether this is a good product and business idea, covering the hypothesis, stakeholders, benefits, risks, metrics, and how you'd test it.
- How would you define success metrics and guardrail metrics for this ranking change, and what tradeoffs would you consider across user experience, advertiser outcomes, and platform revenue?
- Design an A/B test to measure the impact of upranking Shop-destination ads. What would you randomize on, and how would you structure the experiment?
- What sources of bias or confounding would make observational data misleading if you tried to evaluate this change without running a proper experiment?
- Based on your analysis, how would you decide between a global launch, a segmented rollout, or not launching at all?
“This is basically six questions rolled into one, and I didn't realize that until I was already two minutes into talking about small advertisers.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist interview at Meta, Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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