I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter about a possible position. While I was not immediately looking, I was intrigued enough to continue with the process.
I had a quick phone call with my recruiter to go over my background and experience. She concluded the phone call by determining my availability for a technical phone screen and followed up with some research materials to better prepare for the phone screen.
The technical phone screen was set up using collabedit as the platform for sharing code between myself and the interviewer. I was asked a few simple technical questions, and a few harder programming problems dealing with algorithms and data structures. The interviewer was patient and helpful.
The recruiter emailed me the same evening to let me know that I would not be moving further in the process, as my initial hesitations on the early data structure questions signalled poor understanding of basic concepts.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You are given a string with each english character translated to its alphabetical position (e.g., the string "ABC" --> "123"). Provide a function that, when provided the string as an argument, will return the maximum number of strings the encoded string could represent (for example, "123" could represent "ABC", "LC", or "AW").
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
