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Meta interview notes, page 178 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·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Coding round at Meta for an ML Engineer role, and they went straight for a matrix problem that looked deceptively clean on the surface. The real test was whether you'd stop at the heap solution or push into the binary search approach and actually talk through the tradeoffs.
  • Given an n x n matrix where every row and column is sorted in non-decreasing order, find the k-th smallest element. Walk through at least two approaches and compare their complexities.

“I started with the min-heap over row heads, which felt safe.”

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Meta·Data Scientist·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jun 2026
Recruiter behavioral follow-up for a Data Scientist role at Meta, part of what sounds like a pretty drawn-out hiring process. Just one question but it carried a lot of weight given the context around mixed feedback earlier in the loop.
  • Tell me about a time you received unexpected negative feedback or rejection. What did you do about it, and how did it turn out?

“This one stung a little because I knew it was pointed, given that I'd already gotten mixed signals earlier in the process.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Meta infrastructure interview that was basically a maze problem with four layers of increasing complexity. Each sub-problem built on the last, which sounds clean in theory but in practice you're juggling BFS state spaces and TSP DP at the same time. Pretty demanding for a coding round.
  • Given a 2D grid maze with a start and exit, find the shortest path using only 4-directional movement. Return the path length or -1 if unreachable.
  • Extend the maze problem: lowercase letters are keys, uppercase letters are doors. You can't pass through a door without its key. Find the shortest path from start to exit.
  • Now add an energy budget: each move costs 1 energy, some cells refill energy by a given amount, and you need to reach the exit with energy >= 0. How do you solve this?
  • Final extension: visit K target cells in any order, minimize total travel cost, then return to start. How do you approach this optimally?
  • Walk through when you'd choose BFS vs Dijkstra vs A* for pathfinding problems, and how you'd structure the code so each sub-problem reuses components from the previous one.

“Warm-up part, standard BFS.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Meta for a SWE role. Just one conflict management question, pretty standard stuff.
  • Can you walk me through a specific example of how you handled a conflict?

“I had an answer prepped but it still felt clunky coming out.”

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Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta ML engineer interview with a classic array problem. Nothing too wild but the efficiency constraint is where they actually care.
  • Given an array of integers, find the next greater element for each element in the array efficiently.

“Jumped straight to brute force in my head and had to stop myself.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta coding interview, one question the whole session. Algorithmic problem with a tight efficiency constraint, felt like they wanted to see if you'd actually think about it or just brute force it.
  • Given a non-negative integer, perform at most one swap of two digits to produce the largest possible value. Solve it in linear time relative to the number of digits.

“My first instinct was the naive approach, try every pair of digits, which is obviously not O(L).”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Four questions across what felt like a pretty standard Meta coding round, mix of trees and arrays and one OOP design problem with a bunch of follow-ups that went longer than I expected. The difficulty ramp was real and by the fourth question I was running on fumes.
  • Given the root of a binary tree, print the node values level by level. Also state the time and space complexity of your solution.
  • Design a class that tracks strings and how many times each has been added, with methods to add a string, get its current count, and remove it. Follow-ups included computing the total count across all entries efficiently, generalizing to arbitrary data types and swappable data structures, and discussing concurrency and complexity trade-offs.
  • In a binary tree of integers, find how many nodes have a value equal to the average of all values in their subtree (including themselves). Design an O(n) solution.
  • Given an array of wood lengths and a number k, find the largest integer cut length L such that cutting all pieces produces at least k total pieces. Return 0 if it's not possible.

“Classic BFS question.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Meta SWE coding round with a math-heavy array problem. Nothing crazy on the surface but the edge cases with negatives and zeros kept me second-guessing my parity logic the whole time.
  • Given an integer array, count all pairs of indices (i, j) where i < j, the product of the two elements is even, and the distance between the indices is odd.

“My first instinct was brute force and I actually started coding it before catching myself.”

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Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Meta PM interview with a product sense question about WhatsApp. Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Design a new feature for WhatsApp group messages.

“I went straight to brainstorming features without anchoring on user problems first, which I could tell was the wrong move about halfway through.”

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Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Meta MLE technical phone screen, one coding question the whole time. Classic grid traversal but with the keys/doors twist that makes it way more interesting than a plain BFS.
  • Given a grid with walls, open cells, a start, an end, keys (lowercase letters), and locked doors (uppercase letters), find the shortest path from start to end, picking up keys as needed to pass through doors. Return the path length or indicate it's unreachable.

“The naive BFS instinct gets you killed here because you can revisit the same cell under different key states and they're all valid.”

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