I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Apr 2013
Interview
I came onsite for what was described as an hour-long introductory and technical interview. I was greeted by the recruiter and shown around the office (FB NYC), then we chatted for 10-15 minutes. Then an engineer came in and we started the technical part of the interview, which took 45+ minutes (we ran over).
First he asked me about Hadoop, since I mentioned that I used it at my current job. I used hadoop for machine learning tasks, so we discussed the details of the system.
The rest of the interview was coding on a whiteboard. The questions got progressively more difficult.
The first was: Given two string representations of binary numbers (e.g. "1001", "10") write a function that adds them and returns the result as a string as well (e.g. "1011").
The next had several parts:
(a) first, write a function to calculate the hamming distance between two binary numbers
(b) write a function that takes a list of binary numbers and returns the sum of the hamming distances for each pair
(c) the answer I gave for b was O(n^2), I was then tasked with finding a more efficient solution. I struggled mightily, and was eventually helped to the solution by many hints from the interviewer.
After that, I had a chance to ask questions of the interviewer, and then we were done. I don't know if I've made it to the next round or not.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
(a) first, write a function to calculate the hamming distance between two binary numbers
(b) write a function that takes a list of binary numbers and returns the sum of the hamming distances for each pair
(c) find a solution for (b) that works in O(n) time.
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.
Standard cookie cutter interview with a coding interview, a system design interview and culture interview. The coding part is basically leetcode. The system design is what you can find on many youtube videos. The culture one is more tricky as they want to see that you fit Meta's culture, not that you were doing great at your existing company. So skills like dealing with conflict without calling in managers is sought after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
coding: I forgot, sorry
system design: design ticketmaster
culture: talk about past project; when you disagreed with a peer; how I resolved dissagreements, etc.
