Software Engineer · Full Journey · Multiple Types

Meta — Software Engineer ✅ Passed

Level: Senior-Level

Round: Full Journey · Type: Multiple Types · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 300 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly

Topics: Behavioral, Algorithms, System Design

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2025-12-31

Summary

Interview Rounds Overview

• Round 1: Phone Screen
• Round 2: Coding (Virtual Onsite)
• Round 3: System Design (Virtual Onsite)
• Round 4: AI Coding (Virtual Onsite)
• Round 5: Behavioral (Virtual Onsite)

Details

I interviewed with Meta in late 2025. I found a lot of helpful information from standard interview questions, so I'm sharing my experience to give back.

Phone Screen: The first part consisted of standard behavioral questions. The second part involved solving two easy LeetCode problems that were Meta tagged.

Virtual Onsite: The virtual onsite consisted of two coding rounds, two system design rounds, and one behavioral round. The coding and system design rounds didn't include any behavioral questions or even self-introductions; we jumped straight into the questions.

Coding Rounds:

• Coding Question 1: Given a range [-M, M] and several intervals like [1, 3], [2, 4], [5, 8], where [1, 3] represents all integers from 1 to 3 (i.e., [1, 2, 3]), return the number that appears most frequently. If there are multiple such numbers, return any one of them. I used a line sweeping approach similar to LeetCode 253.
• Coding Question 2: This was LeetCode 636.

AI Coding Round:

I was given a maze problem similar to what I had seen in other frequently asked interview questions. I felt it was tedious to implement in Java. The interviewer was very helpful.

System Design Rounds:

• System Design 1: Design an ads impression aggregator that supports real-time updates within 30 seconds and provides the hourly impression count for each ad. A follow-up question asked how to handle the high write throughput to the database.
• System Design 2: Design a Facebook search feature where, given one or more keywords, it returns all posts containing those keywords. This basically required designing an Elastic Search system from scratch.

Behavioral Round:

• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with your manager and how you resolved it.
• Describe a project where you had to deal with a very ambiguous requirement.
• Describe an example of when you mentored someone and gave constructive feedback.
• How do you handle working with difficult people?

LeetCode similar: LeetCode 938, LeetCode 121, LeetCode 253, LeetCode636