I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Jan 2026
Interview
got a dm from a meta recruiter on linkedin. process was super fast. initial recruiter screen was the usual - background and checking alignment on level (e4/e5). then a technical phone screen with two lc style coding questions, mostly mediums around arrays and strings.
the onsite was 4 rounds total. first was a coding round (traditional ds/algo stuff), then sys design where i had to design a real-time collaborative editor - really had to watch out for concurrency and scaling - they keep talking about it. third was leadership & drive, mostly situational stuff like handling conflict or project tradeoffs. the most interesting one was the new ai-assisted coding round. it's not like leetcode - you’re working in a real codebase with multiple files and an ai sidebar. had to build a feature into an existing structure and honestly, it’s tricky because you have to critique the ai output and not just blindly copy it lol. i was a bit shaky on the system design and how to actually 'collab' with the ai without looking like i was cheating, so i did a few mocks on prepfully with a meta swe. that helped a ton with my structure and how to pipeline my thoughts while the ai was generating code so i didn't just sit there idle. got the offer 2 weeks later, team seems great so far!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, write a function to return all strings that are anagrams.
Got a referral through a friend who worked at Meta, which sped up the entire process. After a casual initial chat, I went through a technical interview where I faced a DSA question about validating palindromes. The interviewer was friendly but rigorous. During prep, I had spent time with the coding challenges on PracHub, and it was funny to see a similar palindrome question pop up. Overall, I received an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it after careful consideration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string s, return true if it can be a palindrome after deleting at most one character (Valid Palindrome II).
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
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
