Meta Interview Questions — Page 90

Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Meta for a software engineering role, all four questions were the classic leadership and collaboration prompts you'd expect. Nothing technically surprising but the depth they want in your answers is real.

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with your manager. How did you handle it?
Describe a project where the requirements were vague or constantly shifting. How did you bring clarity and still deliver?
Walk me through a time you mentored someone and had to give them feedback that was hard to hear.
Describe a situation where you had to work closely with someone who was difficult to collaborate with. What did you do and how did it turn out?

“This one made me nervous to prep because you don't want to sound like you're throwing your manager under the bus.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta SWE coding round, one algorithmic problem about interval overlaps. Pretty clean problem once you see the right angle, but I fumbled around with brute force longer than I should have.

Given a list of intervals with positive integer endpoints, find an integer x that is contained in the greatest number of intervals. Return any valid answer if there's a tie.

“My first instinct was to check every point against every interval, which works but is slow.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta SWE coding round, got a binary tree problem that looks straightforward until you actually sit down to implement it. BFS with column tracking is the move but I second-guessed myself halfway through.

Given a binary tree, return its vertical order traversal where nodes are grouped by column index (root at 0, left child at -1, right child at +1), ordered left to right by column and top to bottom within each column.

“I knew BFS was the right approach but spent too long debating whether to use DFS first.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta Data Engineer technical screen, mix of SQL and Python. Nothing too exotic but the SQL self-join question tripped me up and the Python DP one took a minute to remember the pattern. Felt okay leaving but not confident.

Write a SQL query that returns the count of book loans where the book is in good condition and has not yet been returned.
Write a SQL query to return the top 3 books that have more than 10 copies and the highest lifetime value, ordered by lifetime value descending with ties broken by book_id ascending.
Write a SQL query to find the maximum absolute difference in reserved_copies between any inviter and their invitee, using the self-referential Members table.
Implement a function that returns the maximum total score from a list of non-negative integers, where you cannot pick two adjacent elements.
Implement a function to validate a sequence of OPEN/CLOSE log entries, ensuring no double-opens, no close-before-open, and no unclosed resources at the end.
Write a function that takes a list of office objects and a set of closed office IDs, and returns a dictionary mapping each open office's ID to its employee count.
Implement a function that merges two strings by alternating characters, appending any leftover characters from the longer string at the end.

“Pretty straightforward join between Books and Loans, filter on condition and a NULL check on returned_at.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta SWE interview that came down to a graph cloning problem. Pretty focused session, they wanted to see both the implementation and the reasoning around edge cases and complexity.

Given a reference to a node in a connected undirected graph where each node holds a value and a list of neighbors, return a deep copy of the entire graph.

“I went with BFS and kept a map from old nodes to their new clones to avoid revisiting.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta SWE coding round, just the one question about implementing power function. Pretty standard fast exponentiation stuff but the edge cases are where they actually care.

Implement a function that calculates x raised to the power n, handling negative exponents and running in O(log n) time.

“The O(log n) part is the whole point.”

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Meta·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Meta DS interview with a meaty ads ranking design question. The whole session was basically one extended case study about Shop ads, and they kept pushing on tradeoffs I hadn't fully thought through.

Given evidence that users convert better through in-app Shop ads than external links in some contexts, design a ranking algorithm that intelligently promotes Shop ads without degrading user experience or advertiser outcomes. Walk through your ranking objective, features, labels, modeling approach, handling of diverse advertiser goals, evaluation strategy, and potential risks.

“This is a big one and I underestimated how many sub-parts they actually wanted me to cover.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

Meta data engineering interview that went deep on schema design for a social platform's share feature. The whole session revolved around one big design problem with a few sub-questions branching off it. Felt more like a working session than a traditional interview, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

Design a data model for a 'share' action on a social platform where content can be text, image, or video, and shares can go to a thread, a feed, or a direct message.
What indexes and foreign key relationships would you add to support share-based metric queries at scale, and how would you approach partitioning the shares table?
How would you compute share rate per content item (shares divided by impressions) using this schema? Walk through the SQL or pseudocode.
How would you measure share-driven engagement, meaning views or clicks that are directly attributable to a share event downstream?
How would you compute a viral coefficient proxy from this schema, something like average new viewers per share, potentially chained across multiple share hops?
How do privacy settings and audience scoping affect the share data model and the metrics you'd compute from it?

“This is the kind of question that looks straightforward until you realize how many edge cases the schema has to handle.”

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Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round for an MLE role at Meta. Pretty much all situational questions with follow-ups that pushed for specifics, so vague answers don't survive long here.

Tell me about a project you're most proud of.
Describe a project where the requirements were unclear from the start. How did you handle it?
Walk me through a time when the scope or direction of a project shifted significantly partway through. What did you do?
Tell me about constructive feedback you received and how you responded to it.
Describe a time you gave constructive feedback to a colleague.
What's your experience leading or managing others, whether formally or informally?

“Thought I had a solid answer prepped but the follow-ups kept peeling back layers.”

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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Meta for a software engineer role. The prompt was an Uber-like taxi service with a twist on the driver matching flow, and I left feeling pretty confident I bombed it.

Design a ride-hailing service where a trip request is broadcast to multiple drivers simultaneously, the user selects a driver from those who respond, and the chosen driver must then confirm acceptance before the ride is booked.

“My pacing was terrible.”

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