I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (Pittsburgh, PA) in Feb 2014
Interview
It was an on-campus interview in CMU. I went to one of the job affairs of the university, and received an email about the interview within a week.
Facebook also held a candidate reception in one of the plazas near CMU campus. We got the chance to know our interviewers in advance to ask any questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
As for the interview itself, I was asked several general questions about my projects (nothing too special, really). The coding question is a standard regular expression matching one which you can find on LeetCode. Since I'm still doing my Master program, I haven't yet reached that far on LeetCode. I did solve the question in the end after the interviewer gave me some hint...But I don't think I did a very good job.
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
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.
