Software Engineer

Full Loop
Interview Prep
Guide

Welcome to your prep guide for your interview process with Meta.
What you’ll find Our engineers and recruiters put together this guide so you know
in this guide
what to expect and how to prepare. This document is quite lengthy
Interview process overview but is designed to answer most of the questions you may have
about the role, the interview process, and how to set yourself up
Coding interview for success by preparing.
Design interview
One important piece of advice for your interview: it’s ok if you don’t
Behavioral interview know! No one who works at Meta is an expert in all things, and we
don’t look for perfection in the people we interview. If you aren’t
Appendix / resources
sure if something is true or if it’s the best solution then say that.
Explain what you do know, and your interviewer will ask you
follow-up questions.
Before you get started, it's important to note that Meta is
committed to providing reasonable support (called
accommodations) in our recruiting processes for candidates with
disabilities, long term conditions, mental health conditions or
sincerely held religious beliefs, or who are neurodivergent or
require pregnancy-related support. If you need support, please
reach out to accommodations-ext@fb.com or your recruiter.

Interview process overview

What will your interview process be like?
Your interview process will include a number of 45-minute interviews. Each
interviewer should also leave a few minutes at the end for your questions.

• Coding
• Design
• Behavioral

1
Coding interview
What can you expect?
This interview focuses heavily on coding. You’ll be assessed on how you solved
the problem as well as the structure and style of your code. It’s best to avoid bugs,
but the interviewer will not compile your code so don’t worry about making minor
mistakes. Finding and catching bugs in your code is a positive sign!

Additionally, they’ll want to hear your thought process throughout, so be sure to

provide a narrative as you go through the code. The language you will code in may
vary depending upon the specific role for which you are interviewing (see below
for a list of languages by role). Please confirm the coding language preference with
your recruiter.

• Product or System Generalist: language is candidate's choice

• User Interface or Front End Engineering: JavaScript

Have questions about the format or details of your specific interview? Your
recruiter can help!

What do we look for?

Your interviewer will be thinking about how your skills and experience might help
Meta. In your coding interview, your interviewer will assess your performance on
four focus areas:

• Problem solving: We’re evaluating how you comprehend and explain complex
ideas. Are you providing the reasoning behind a particular solution? Developing
and comparing multiple solutions? Using appropriate data structures?
Speaking about space and time complexity? Optimizing your solution?
• Coding: Can you convert solutions to executable code? Is the code organized
and does it have the right logical structure?
• Verification: Are you considering a reasonable number of test cases or coming
up with a good argument for why your code is correct? If your solution has
bugs, are you able to walk through your own logic to find them and explain
what the code is doing?
• Communication: Are you asking for requirements and clarity when necessary,
or are you just diving into the code? Your coding interview should be a
conversation, so don’t forget to ask questions.

2
How to prep
Interviewers can only assess your skills and abilities based on what you show them
during your interview, so it’s important to plan and prepare to best showcase your
strengths.

As you begin preparing, please reference your Career Profile for role-specific prep
materials. We use many different coding languages at Meta so practice in the
coding language that you are most confident in unless otherwise noted based on
your specific role or informed by your recruiter. Scripting languages tend to be
easier to use in coding interviews, but stick with a language you are comfortable
with rather than attempting to learn a new one.

You should expect to solve about two problems in the course of about 40 minutes.
When you have a solution, be sure to review it. Make sure that it’s correct, that
you’ve considered the edge cases, that it’s efficient, and that it clearly reflects the
ideas that you’re trying to express in your code.

In addition to reviewing the above fundamentals, these tips may be helpful:

• Schedule time to study and practice. Block out time every day to write code.
You’ll need to practice writing code without executing it - without the help of a
compiler and debugger. This will simulate a timed interview environment.
There are several resources available in the Preparation Hub within your
Career Profile including coding puzzles and practice interviews.
• Prioritize breadth over depth. It’s much better to practice solving fewer
example problems of many problem types than to become very familiar with
one type at the expense of the others.
• Think about different algorithms and algorithmic techniques (e.g., iteration,
sorting, divide-and-conquer, recursion). We do not ask dynamic programming
questions so don’t spend time prepping for that technique and focus your
efforts elsewhere.
• Think about data structures, particularly the ones used most often. For
instance, array, stack (or queues), hashtable, trees (including specialized trees
like binary trees and binary search trees), graphs, and heaps.
• Analyze the problem and make sure that you fully understand it before
jumping in. It’s OK to ask clarifying questions during the interview to ensure
you understand the exact problem you are trying to solve. Also, breaking down
the problem into smaller pieces can be helpful.
• Get comfortable with the medium you’ll use in the interview. In other words,
try writing code with just a plain text editor with no compiler, linter, syntax
highlighter, autocomplete, and so on. Please also practice talking through a
problem before you start coding. Your interviewer will be evaluating how you
explore the problem space and weigh different possible solutions so it’s crucial
to help the interviewer understand your choices.
• Keep things simple. If you find the solution getting excessively complex, step
back and ask if there’s a simpler way to solve it. It may also be helpful to write
everything out so you can see insights and bugs faster and make fewer
mistakes.

3
Design Interview
This interview may be systems, product, or front end focused depending upon the
specific position for which you are interviewing. While much of the prep
information will be the same across all interview types, please be mindful that
there are key differences between the interviews that we will discuss below.
Please connect with your recruiter if you are unsure which interview type to
prepare for during your prep.

What can you expect?

The design interview is 45-minutes and covers the design of complex systems or
products and the tradeoffs within your design. The scope of this question can vary
widely.

• System and product: this will be a challenging and deeply technical discussion
around product ideas, usability issues, scalability, data structures,
technologies used and more holistic parts of building a software solution.

• Front end: you will be asked to discuss a non-trivial front end-focused design
problem that requires connecting multiple concepts.

What do we look for?

The purpose of this interview is to assess your ability to solve a non-trivial
engineering design problem. The interviewer is trying to determine if you can
architect a solution to a higher-level problem that requires connecting multiple
concepts. The question will be something very high-level and it will be up to you to
drive the conversation. In this interview, your interviewer will assess your
performance on four focus areas:

• Problem navigation: Are you demonstrating your ability to organize

the problem space, the constraints, and the potential solutions? You should
be asking questions to reduce ambiguity, identify the most critical problems,
understand what is needed for quantitative analysis, and define a
requirement set to design to.
• Solution design: We are evaluating your ability to design a working solution
that addresses either the complete problem/design or pieces of the
problem/design. Are you able to consider the big picture in your design?
• Technical excellence: Can you dive into the technical details when needed?
Can you identify and articulate the dependencies and trade-offs? How are
you mitigating potential risks and failure points?
• Technical communication: Can you articulate your vision and technical ideas
clearly? We are assessing your ability to communicate your reasoning as well
as understand and address feedback from the interviewer.

How to prep
This may be a challenging interview to prep for given it is so interactive and there’s
no “right answer” for a design problem. Use the prep tips here and the resources
listed in the appendix.

4
 • Improve upon a design. Think about and review the complex systems you’ve
already designed. What would you change about your approach if you did it all
over again? What worked well?
• Design from the ground up. Think about how you’d design a system that Meta
(or another large tech company) already has. It’s a good exercise to think
through the complicated, high-scale systems that you already use every day.
How would you design it from scratch? What are the bottlenecks to your
solution? How would you address them?
• Think through tradeoffs. Avoid focusing on only optimal solutions. We're much
more interested in seeing how you think through basic tradeoffs.
• Do some research. Read engineering blogs about approaches that have
worked for big companies along the way. Read about the false-starts too!
• Be holistic and detailed. Practice moving effortlessly from high-level
information to the precise details. Outline the high-level requirements by
describing what components you may need, how they fit together, and how to
get to that solution.
• Practice: Find a few system design questions online and try to answer them on
paper in roughly 30 minutes per question. You can also use the Interview
Simulator in the Preparation Hub within your Career Profile.
• Start with the requirements. Your interviewer might ask: “How would you
architect the front-end for a messaging system?” Obviously, this question
is extremely vague so you could start with some requirements:

• How many users are we talking about?

• What should the experience be while you’re waiting for confirmation?
• How will you show error states?
• What are the latency requirements for sender–receiver message delivery?
• What kind of features are we going to need to support?
• What operations does this data store need to support?
• How do you push new messages to clients? Do you push at all, or rely on a
pull-based model?

During the interview

System design
In the system design interview we will expect you to demonstrate an
understanding of the low-level restraints and how they affect the high-level
goals. Be sure to talk through your solutions while keeping in mind different
tradeoffs. Some areas to discuss in system design:

• Testability: formally, or otherwise, gaining confidence that the components

are correct.
• Usability: customer's experience with the system or product and how to
evolve it quickly.
• Extensibility: changing the software system over time.
• Security: can the system or product survive DDOS, spoofing, tampering,
repudiation, etc.

5
 • Portability: execution in different environments.
• Availability: how the system survives failures.
• Scalability: how the system can grow over time.
• Operational characteristics: diagnosing or debugging problems when they
occur.

Example system design questions:

• Design a URL shortener
• Build a Facebook chat
• Architect a worldwide video distribution system

Product architecture or design

During the product architecture or design interview, the interviewer will focus on
building a product or API at scale that supports an end user product or service.
You should be familiar with the areas below, but we're not looking for you to be an
expert in all of them. You should know enough to weight design considerations
(and understand when to consult an expert) for:

• Storage data models

• Scalability
• Design patterns
• Data ownership
• Protocols
• Data formats
• Client-server design
• Designing for long-term vs. complexity
• Accommodating possible product changes

Example product architecture or design questions

• Design a service or product API
• Design a chat service or a feed API
• Design an email server

Front end design

During the front end or UIE design, the interviewer will expect you to be able to
think about the whole design and how it fits into the bigger picture. They will be
looking to see that you have a good understanding of some key concepts in front
end design, including:
• Browsers
• User experience
• DOM performance

6
 • API design
• Scalability
Example front end design question
• Architect the front end of a messaging system
• Design video in Facebook newsfeed

Behavioral Interview
What can you expect?
The behavioral interview will consist of a 45-minute session. Your interviewer
will want to learn about your background, what you’re passionate about in tech,
and what kind of impact you want to make.

What do we look for?

The purpose of the behavioral interview is to assess if a candidate will thrive in
Meta’s fast-paced and highly unstructured environment. To that end, we assess
candidates on five signals that correlate with success at Meta:

• Resolving conflict: What kind of disagreements have you had with colleagues
and/or managers? How have you resolved them? Can you empathize with
people whose points of view differ radically from yours?
• Growing continuously: Your interviewer will be assessing your aptitude for
seeking out opportunities for growth and learning. Do you take constructive
criticism as an opportunity to improve? How have you approached improving
your skills?
• Embracing ambiguity: How do you operate in an ambiguous and quickly
changing environment? Are you comfortable making decisions and
maintaining high levels of productivity when you are missing information or
lack clarity? How did you react when you had to quickly pivot away from a
project due to a shift in priority?
• Driving results: We will be evaluating your experience pushing yourself and
others to deliver against goals and objectives. How do you demonstrate your
impact? Are you self-directed in reaching goals despite challenges and
roadblocks?
• Communicating effectively: How well do you communicate with teams? What
about cross-functional partners? How do you tailor your communications
based on the work and/or the audience?

7
We may ask you to:
• Discuss available details of past and current projects

• Provide specific examples about what you did and the resulting impact.

• Share what you learned from a past situation.

• Talk about what you like about your current role and/or being a developer.

How to prep
Just like with the coding and design interviews, it’s important to prepare ahead
of time for interviews designed to get to know you better.

• Know yourself. Take the time to review your own résumé as your interviewer
will almost certainly ask about key events in your work history. Be prepared to
discuss projects in depth. It's helpful to outline 2-3 major projects ahead of
time.
• Be honest. Not every project is a runaway success and we may not always
interact perfectly with our peers. Being transparent in these situations won’t
be counted against you in the interview. In fact, sharing & discussing how you
learned, improved, and grew from your past experiences is valued.
• Use the S.T.A.R. method to mentally organize your thoughts. This will provoke
a well- thought-out and chronological action of events. Easy to describe, easy
to follow. You can practice this method using the Journaling Exercises in the
Preparation Hub within your Career Profile.

• S—One or two sentences about the SITUATION: What happened?

• T—Describe the TASK: What was your specific goal?
• A—ACTIONS you took to overcome the obstacles and complete your
objective.
• R—The tangible / quantifiable RESULTS of the situation: How did it help
the team / company?

• Have concrete examples or anecdotes. Support each question with practical

experiences and examples. Avoid theoretical answers - if you go into a
theoretical tangent, your interviewer will redirect you to provide a concrete
example.

8
Appendix / resources
Links to exercises, information, and guides to help you prepare
Below you will find some helpful resources for your interview. Take a look through
the list as you prepare.

About Meta
• Meta Life website
• Meta Diversity website
• Meta Quarterly Earnings
• Join our Meta Careers Talent Community Page for the latest updates.
• Meta Newsroom
• Request to interact with an employee and learn what it's like to work at
Meta through the Meta Connections Program

Meta’s Technical Environment

• Engineering @ Meta Facebook page
• Meta Code videos
• Meta Open Source website
• Engineering Leadership at Meta blog

Coding Resources
• Software Engineering Interview Q+A Video
• Cracking the Meta Coding Interview Videos (The Approach and
Problem Walk-through)(password: FB_IPS)

• Topcoder
• GeeksQuiz
• CareerCup

System Design Resources

• System Design & Product Architecture Interview Overview (Video)

• Design Questions online tutorial
• Grokking the System Design Interview
• System Design Primer (GitHub)
• HiredInTech System Design for Tech Interviews course
• Familiarize yourself with Excalidraw

Thank you for taking the time to review this guide!

9