← Back to Directory

Meta interview notes, page 176 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

Jun 2026
PM interview at Meta with a classic metrics/goals question framed around DoorDash. Pretty standard product sense territory but the cross-company framing threw me a bit.
  • You're a PM at DoorDash. Define the key goals and metrics you'd use to measure the health of the business.

“The DoorDash wrapper felt a little random for a Meta interview.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta Production Engineer interview with a string parsing problem that looks deceptively simple until you actually try to implement it cleanly. Two pointers, edge cases everywhere.
  • Given a string and an abbreviation, write a function to determine whether the abbreviation is valid. An abbreviation replaces one or more non-adjacent substrings with their lengths, and numbers can't have leading zeros.

“Went in thinking this was easy and got humbled by the edge cases pretty fast.”

View Post

Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta data scientist interview focused entirely on a probability/stats case about ad insertion methods in a newsfeed. Six questions, all branching from the same scenario, which was a nice change from the usual grab-bag format but meant there was nowhere to hide if you fumbled the setup.
  • Under each ad insertion method, how many ads would you expect a user to see when scrolling through 100 posts?
  • What is the probability that a user sees more than twice the expected number of ads under each method, and how do those probabilities compare?
  • Which insertion method is more likely to produce consecutive ads, and how would the maximum streak length differ between the two?
  • What is the probability that a user encounters at least one pair of back-to-back ads across 100 posts under each method?
  • From the user's perspective and from the platform's perspective, which method is preferable and why?
  • How would you design an experiment to compare these two ad insertion methods in a real-world setting?

“This was the warmup and I almost overthought it.”

View Post

Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a Data Scientist role at Meta. Four-part question built around two tables, covering unread notification rates, per-type breakdowns, multi-account person detection, and deduplication. Pretty demanding for a phone screen.
  • Given a notifications table and a people_users table, write SQL to find what percentage of users currently have at least one unread notification. Return the numerator, denominator, and percentage rounded to 2 decimal places. The denominator must include users with zero notifications.
  • Break down the unread notification percentage by notification_type. For each type, return the number of users with at least one unread of that type, the total user count, and the percentage. A user can appear in multiple types.
  • What percentage of distinct persons have more than one associated user account? Also report what percentage of all user_ids belong to those multi-account persons.
  • How would you make your SQL queries robust to duplicate rows in the notifications table, where the same notification_id might be logged more than once? Briefly explain your deduplication assumption in a comment.

“The denominator piece is where I almost tripped up.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta software engineer interview with a string parsing problem that looks simple until you actually sit down and think through all the edge cases.
  • Given a string that may contain parentheses and other characters, find the minimum number of parentheses that need to be removed to make the string balanced. In other words, count the total number of unmatched '(' and unmatched ')' characters.

“My first instinct was to just count opens and closes and subtract, which is wrong.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta SWE coding round, one sliding window problem about finding the shortest substring with exactly N unique characters. Pretty focused session, nothing crazy beyond that one question.
  • Given a string and an integer n, find the length of the shortest substring that contains exactly n unique characters. Return 0 if no such substring exists.

“Sliding window felt like the right move and it was, but the 'exactly n' constraint tripped me up at first.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta phone screen for a software engineer role, focused entirely on string parsing. The main problem was straightforward enough but the follow-ups got tricky fast and I don't think I handled the complexity analysis part particularly well.
  • Implement a function that checks whether a given abbreviation is valid for a given word, where a number in the abbreviation means that many characters are skipped and leading zeros are not allowed.
  • Given two abbreviations, determine whether there is at least one word that both could validly represent. If yes, return true and show one possible alignment of which positions are kept vs skipped.
  • What is the time and space complexity of your solution, and how would you adapt it for very long inputs or a streaming validation scenario?

“Pretty clean to code once you think through the edge cases.”

View Post

Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Meta for a PM role. Just one question but it had some teeth to it.
  • Tell me about a time you learned something from media (a podcast, article, book, etc.) and actually applied it to your work.

“I blanked for a second because 'media' felt weirdly broad.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Meta data engineering interview, data modeling round centered entirely on the Private Account feature. One big open-ended question that kept branching into sub-problems. Dense but interesting if you like schema design.
  • Design a data model for a Private Account feature. Walk through the relevant entities and their attributes, define the relationships and cardinalities between them, and identify the analytical dimensions an analyst would care about (things like privacy state, request state, time, geography, device). Then decide whether you'd go with a normalized OLTP schema or a star/snowflake analytics schema and justify why. Also explain how you'd handle schema evolution and track historical state when an account switches between public and private.

“This was basically five questions stitched into one.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Round 2 AI coding interview at Meta for a Software Engineer role. It was a maze problem, which apparently has come up enough times that there's no shortage of prep material out there for it.
  • Solve a maze traversal problem, finding a path through a grid from start to finish.

“Pretty well-documented problem in the prep community so I wasn't totally blindsided.”

View Post