Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
- Determine whether a given string is a valid palindrome.
“Pretty bread and butter as far as coding questions go.”
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
“Pretty bread and butter as far as coding questions go.”
“This one took me a second to parse because the four parts feel deceptively independent but they're really a chain.”
“This one is bigger than it looks.”
“The 95% accuracy sounds reassuring until you run the numbers and realize the base rate is doing most of the damage.”
“Two-pointer skipping once on mismatch is the move.”
“The dedup constraint is what makes this hard.”
“I went straight for engagement metrics and kind of forgot to anchor on what problem the AI was actually solving first.”
“I went straight into features and the interviewer just kind of waited.”
“The tricky part is that the longest path doesn't have to go through the root, which is what kills most people.”
“I went straight to usage data and surveys, which felt a bit flat in hindsight.”