Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Meta — Software Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 7/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Friendly

Topics: Arrays, Trees, Binary Search Trees, Optimization, Data Structures

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2026-01-15

Summary

I had a phone screen with a focus on data structures and algorithms. The interviewer asked two LeetCode-style questions with follow-up variations.

Details

The technical phone screen was conducted by an engineer. He asked me two questions:

1. Find the kth largest element in an array (LeetCode 215).
2. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree (LeetCode 236).

Both questions had follow-up questions and variations:

• How can the solution be optimized if the tree is a Binary Search Tree (BST)?
• What if the nodes have parent pointers?
• What if the tree is too large to fit in memory?

I had seen both questions before and quickly provided optimal solutions. However, some initial test cases provided by the interviewer failed, potentially due to modifications in Meta's internal problem set.

LeetCode similar: LeetCode 215, LeetCode 236