I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta (New York, NY) in Mar 2013
Interview
Had an HR phone call that was mostly basic questions about previous experience, and why I feel I would be a good fit at Facebook. At the end of the call, we set up an on-site technical interview. Had to postpone it a while, but they were very helpful with rescheduling whenever was convenient for me. The technical interview went well, getting a tour of the facility before sitting down with an engineer. The interview lasted around an hour. I was asked a question about checking for palindromes, and a question about graph traversal. Ran into some trouble with the graph traversal, which I eventually described to the interviewer correctly, but didn't have enough time to write it on the whiteboard. I think that's the reason I was told to get more experience and reapply in a few months.
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.
