Meta interview notes, page 225 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·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Meta SWE coding round with a greedy/array problem that looks straightforward but has a few gotchas once you start thinking about edge cases.

Given an array of building heights like [5,7,9,4,11], find the minimum total height you need to add (you can only increase, never decrease) so that every adjacent pair of buildings differs by at most 1. The sequence can go up or down.

“Spent the first few minutes just staring at the example trying to figure out if this was a DP problem or something greedy.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Meta for a software engineering role. The whole session was built around one meaty problem: design a ticketing platform with seat holds, concurrency controls, and scale. Left feeling like I covered the basics but probably didn't go deep enough on the consistency trade-offs.

Design an online ticketing system like Ticketmaster. Users should be able to browse events, pick specific seats, and place a temporary 5-minute hold on seats while they finish paying. The system must prevent two users from buying the same seat and handle massive traffic spikes for popular events.

“This one sprawled in every direction.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Meta SWE coding round with two LeetCode-style problems. Nothing too wild but both questions required some thought, not just pattern matching.

Given a string of parentheses and letters, remove the minimum number of parentheses to make the string valid.
In a binary tree, find all nodes that are exactly K edges away from a given target node.

“Stack-based approach is the move here.”

View Post

Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026

Meta PM interview, product analytics focus. Just one question but it was enough to make me realize I hadn't thought carefully enough about search as a distinct surface.

What metrics would you use to measure the success of contextual search on Instagram?

“I went straight to engagement metrics and kind of fumbled the 'contextual' part for the first minute.”

View Post

Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Meta DS interview with a product analytics angle. One meaty scenario question about a counterintuitive metric relationship, the kind where you have to slow down and actually think before saying anything.

Autoplay snippets are rolled out and you observe shorter session lengths but higher daily active users. Walk through the behavioral hypotheses that could explain this and how you'd test each one.

“This is the kind of question where your first instinct is wrong and you kind of have to let yourself be wrong for a second before course-correcting.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026

Meta SWE coding round with a multi-part grid maze problem. Four sub-questions building on the same grid setup, reachability through path counting. The layered structure felt intentional, like they were watching how you extend a solution rather than just whether you could solve it.

Given an m x n grid where cells are either free or blocked, and a start and target position, answer four sub-questions in sequence: (1) is the target reachable from the start, (2) what is the shortest number of steps to reach it, (3) return one valid shortest path as a coordinate list, and (4) count the total number of distinct shortest paths.

“The first two parts were fine, BFS is BFS.”

View Post

Meta·Data Scientist·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026

Went through a structured Meta Data Scientist loop that felt more like a leadership assessment than a typical DS screen. The questions covered everything from team org design to comp negotiation strategy, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

Give a 90-second self-introduction tailored to this role, highlighting one or two quantifiable achievements most relevant to the position.
Describe your current team's structure, including headcount, roles, reporting lines, onshore/offshore split, and how you split your own time across execution, coordination, and strategy.
Map the top three requirements of this role to specific past accomplishments with metrics, and identify one gap you have relative to the role along with a 30-day plan to close it.
With limited headcount this quarter, how would you decide between hiring versus rescoping existing work, and which two roles or contractors would you bring in first?
What are your location constraints, work authorization status, and what trade-offs are you willing to make on compensation, travel, or hybrid arrangements?
What seniority level are you targeting, and what would you do if the offer came back one level lower or one level higher than expected?

“I over-rehearsed this and it came out sounding robotic.”

View Post

Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

Behavioral screen at Meta, just the one question about a project your manager didn't back. Short but surprisingly hard to answer well in the moment.

Tell me about a project your manager didn't support. What did you do and what happened?

“I had a decent story ready but fumbled the 'what happened' part.”

View Post

Meta·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026

Product sense round at Meta for a PM role. Just one question but it had a lot of surface area and I felt like I only scratched it.

If you were the PM for a workplace chat app, what metrics would you use to measure its success?

“I jumped straight to DAU and message volume and then kind of stalled.”

View Post

Meta·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026

Meta SWE interview centered on a progressive object-oriented design problem for a banking system, built up across four levels of increasing complexity. The structure was CodeSignal-style with specific API contracts to implement in-memory. Pretty demanding scope for a single session.

Design an in-memory banking system supporting account creation, deposits, and transfers between accounts, with appropriate error handling for invalid operations.
Extend the banking system to support a top spenders leaderboard that ranks accounts by total outgoing transfer volume, with tie-breaking by account ID.
Add scheduled payment functionality to the banking system, including the ability to create payments that execute at a future timestamp and cancel them by a globally incrementing payment ID.
Implement account merging (combining balances, outgoing totals, and scheduled payments) and historical balance queries that return what an account's balance was at a specific past timestamp.

“The first level felt straightforward until I started second-guessing the return types.”

View Post