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Meta interview notes, page 82 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

May 2026
Meta MLE interview with a debugging task on a friend recommendation system. Pretty focused, just one coding problem but it had enough edge cases to trip you up if you weren't paying attention.
  • You're given a friend recommendation codebase with a buggy function that determines whether a candidate is a valid recommendation for a user. Fix it so it correctly excludes the user themselves and anyone already in their friend list, then verify against the provided unit tests.

“The bug itself wasn't hard to spot once I read the code carefully.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Meta SWE interview with a pretty gnarly tree traversal problem that had a few layers to it. The follow-up about zigzag order is what really separated people, I think.
  • Given a binary tree and a predicate function P(node), do a level-order traversal that collects only the nodes satisfying P at each level, using only stacks (no queues). Return a list of levels with nodes in left-to-right order. Walk through the algorithm, argue its correctness, and give time and space complexity.
  • Adapt the same stack-based level traversal to output nodes in zigzag order (alternating left-to-right and right-to-left by level), still without using any queues.

“The stack-only constraint is what tripped me up first.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Meta data science interview with a product sense question focused on accessibility. Single question, fairly open-ended, and I spent way too long on the feature ideas before realizing they probably cared more about the metrics side.
  • A user advocacy group raises concerns about accessibility for people with hearing disabilities. What product improvements would you propose for Facebook Live and Videos, and how would you measure success?

“I went straight into feature brainstorming: auto-captions, caption accuracy improvements, visual sound indicators for Live.”

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Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
A deep-dive case interview at Meta for a DS role on content integrity. The whole thing was basically one giant open-ended question about how you'd measure and experiment around harmful content, and it went way longer than I expected.
  • How would you define and represent the 'severity' of harmful content in a way that supports both measurement and decision-making? Walk through what signals you'd use and whether you'd go with a binary label, ordinal levels, or a continuous score.
  • Design a primary metric, a set of diagnostic metrics, and guardrail metrics for measuring the impact of a harmful content intervention. Define them precisely, including numerators, denominators, and any weighting.
  • For an experiment evaluating a harmful content intervention, what randomization unit would you choose and why? How do you handle interference and spillover given that content spreads across social graphs?
  • What are the major biases and pitfalls when measuring harmful content at scale? Cover things like reporting bias, labeling drift, rare severe harms vs common low-severity ones, and how you'd make a final launch recommendation.

“This is where I spent too long philosophizing.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Quick Meta technical screen, just one Python question about inheritance. Not much to report.
  • Can a subclass in Python inherit from more than one base class?

“Pretty basic multiple inheritance question.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Did a system design round at Meta for a software engineer role and got rejected. The round itself wasn't impossibly hard, but I fumbled the capacity estimation piece badly enough that I couldn't recover, and the rest of the session kind of fell apart from there.
  • Design a web crawling system that runs across 10,000 machines. Consider distributed caching, deduplication, and network throughput.

“Asked upfront whether I should do capacity estimation.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta SWE interview with a string manipulation problem that sounds straightforward until they start asking you to prove minimality and then hit you with a follow-up about generating all valid results.
  • Given a string with lowercase letters and parentheses, remove the minimum number of parentheses to make it valid. Return any one valid result in O(n) time. Describe your algorithm, argue why it's minimal, and analyze the complexity.
  • Follow-up: how would you modify your approach to output ALL possible valid results when multiple minimum-removal solutions exist?

“I got the two-pass stack approach pretty fast, track unmatched opens and then sweep for unmatched closes.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta SWE coding round, one problem about counting three-digit numbers with distinct digits in a given range. Pretty focused session, nothing wild.
  • Given a range [left, right] where both bounds are three-digit numbers, count how many integers in that range have all three digits distinct from each other.

“Seemed straightforward at first, just iterate and check each number.”

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Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Meta data scientist interview focused on a product scenario around feed card design changes. Two meaty questions, both requiring you to think across metrics, revenue, and regional differences at the same time. Not a casual screen.
  • If the height of a post card is reduced by 15%, how would you measure the impact on user experience and engagement?
  • After launching the card redesign, U.S. revenue increased but Thailand revenue dropped. What do you investigate and what do you do next?

“I went straight to visible posts per viewport and scroll velocity, which felt right, but I kind of glossed over ad impressions and how compressing cards changes the ad slot density.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Went through the behavioral round for a software engineer role at Meta. Seven or eight questions, all pretty standard fare, but the volume means you need a solid rotation of examples ready or you'll start recycling stories.
  • Tell me about a time you had a conflict or disagreement with a teammate or stakeholder. How did you handle it, and what was the outcome?
  • Describe a time you proactively identified an inefficiency or quality issue and drove an improvement without being asked.
  • Tell me about a time you influenced others when there was no clear agreement on the best path forward.
  • Describe a situation where you took ownership of an ambiguous problem.
  • Tell me about a mistake or failed attempt and what you learned from it.

“Classic opener.”

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