I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I got the opportunity through internal referral.
I passed an technical phone screening and was invited to an on-site. I had 5 interviews in total. Two coding, two system design, one with manager (on PhD research + a quick coding exercise).
The technical questions were not too difficult, but I was unprepared for the system design problems. One of the interviewers kept walking around in the room and was really distracting and annoying. I couldn't focus on solving the problem and didn't do well in that session.
The interviewing schedule was not the best. I was scheduled to have lunch at 2pm PST, but considering I'm from a couple time zones east of PST, I was already way too hungry to have lunch at that time. Perhaps a low blood sugar level also contributed to my impaired thinking abilities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Signed NDA. Distributed system design problems were out of my expectation as I do not claim any experience in that area nor was I interviewing with any positions related to that area.
Took about a month altogether, which felt longer given the intensity of the process. Kicked off with a technical screening, followed by two rigorous coding interviews. The DSA question on binary tree vertical order traversal hit me hard at first, but then I recognized the prompt instantly — I had just worked through something similar on PracHub. The final round was focused on system design, and while I ended up receiving an offer, I ultimately declined it. Overall, a challenging experience that definitely sharpened my skills.
1 leetcode med, 1 leetcode hard. make sure you know your DSA and leetcode questions. I wasn't able to get an offer bc i didnt complete the second question. Got a reply 2 days later saying they would move on
Overall, the process took a little over two weeks, which felt a bit longer than I anticipated. After a quick screening, I went through two technical rounds focusing on coding and DSA concepts. One of the questions was a classic palindrome check; mid-way through, I realized it was something I had practiced on PracHub just days earlier. The final step was a casual behavioral interview. I was relieved to get an offer shortly after, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string, determine if it is a valid palindrome considering only alphanumeric characters and ignoring case.