Meta — Software Engineer ✅ Passed
Level: Unknown Level
Round: Full Journey · Type: Multiple Types · Difficulty: 7/10 · Duration: 240 min · Interviewer: Neutral
Topics: Algorithms, Data Structures, System Design, Behavioral Questions, AI-Enabled Coding, Backtracking, Dynamic Programming, Bitmask, Graph Traversal, Breadth-First Search, Depth-First Search, Two Pointers
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Interview date: 2025-12-27
Summary
I summarized the most common asked Meta interview questions, hope it's helpful :)
Details
Coding Questions:
These are commonly asked questions in interviews.
- LeetCode 138: Copy List with Random Pointer
- LeetCode 227: Basic Calculator II
- LeetCode 56: Merge Intervals
- LeetCode 235/236: Lowest Common Ancestor (BST/Binary Tree)
- LeetCode 1650: Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree III
- LeetCode 34: Find First and Last Position of Element in Sorted Array
- LeetCode 32: Longest Valid Parentheses
- LeetCode 863: All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree
- LeetCode 647: Palindromic Substrings
- LeetCode 528: Random Pick with Weight
- LeetCode 536: Construct Binary Tree from String
- LeetCode 1570: Dot Product of Two Sparse Vectors (two pointers)
- LeetCode 408: Valid Word Abbreviation
- LeetCode 680/1216: Valid Palindrome II/III
- LeetCode 958: Check Completeness of a Binary Tree
- Flight ticket + return problem
- Binary Tree Right Side View
- LeetCode 2611: Mice and Cheese
- LeetCode 341: Flatten Nested List Iterator
- LeetCode 405: Convert a Number to Hexadecimal
- LeetCode 224: Basic Calculator
- LeetCode 636: Exclusive Time of Functions
- LeetCode 398: Random Pick Index
- LeetCode 1249: Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses
- LeetCode 339: Nested List Weight Sum
- LeetCode 973: K Closest Points to Origin
- LeetCode 560: Subarray Sum Equals K
- LeetCode 129: Sum Root to Leaf Numbers
- LeetCode 317: Shortest Distance from All Buildings
- LeetCode 494: Target Sum
- LeetCode 1424: Diagonal Traverse II
- LeetCode 348: Design Tic-Tac-Toe
- LeetCode 827: Making A Large Island
- LeetCode 76: Minimum Window Substring
- LeetCode 921: Minimum Add to Make Parentheses Valid
- Next Permutation
- LeetCode 173: Binary Search Tree Iterator
- LeetCode 938: Range Sum of BST
- LeetCode 347: Top K Frequent Elements
Behavioral Questions:
Key topics included:
- Most successful project
- Conflict/disagreement
- Giving/receiving feedback
- Ambiguous project
- Failed project + reflection
- Cross-team collaboration
- Leadership feedback
- Priority conflict
- Setback
- Lead initiative
Core focus:
- Conflict resolution
- Ownership
- Self-reflection
- Ambiguity handling
System Design Questions:
Previously asked questions:
- Online Auction
- Polling vs. Long Polling vs. SSE
- Database design
- Ticketmaster (with 5-minute hold)
- News Feed (comment, like)
- Ads System (100M req/s)
- WhatsApp-like status
- Leaderboard (Redis ranking)
- Job Scheduler
- Food delivery (similar to Uber Eats)
- Netflix
- Versioned KV store (supports rollback)
- Web crawler (10k nodes)
AI-Enabled Coding:
-
Maze project (key focus):
- Maze printer/solver
- Debug + fix bug
- BFS/visited/path
Key points:
- Don't rely on AI to debug
- BFS vs. DFS
- Visited set
- Edge case (door/wall)
-
Poker game problem (difficult):
- Simulate drawing cards
- Greedy vs. Backtracking
- Optimize strategy
Later stages:
- AI generates unit tests
- Debug + simulate
- Success rate ~40% -> 90%
-
Maximum Unique String:
- Find subset with maximum unique characters
Key points:
- Backtracking + bitmask
- Memoization/DP optimization
Challenges:
- Large dataset
- Recursion depth
- AI prone to giving incorrect solutions
Key Interview Summary (Very Important):
- Coding:
- Don't rely on AI
- Explaining your thought process is more important than writing code
- Pay attention to edge cases
- System Design:
- Don't be defensive
- Explain tradeoffs
- Deep dive into details
- Behavioral:
- Conflict resolution is key
- Provide specific details
- Include reflection