Meta Software Engineer Interview Questions and AI Preparation
Ten days. That is how long Meta gave me between my phone screen and my onsite. I had just come off a Google loop where three weeks passed between stages and i assumed Meta would be similar. My recruiter called on a Monday, phone screen the following Monday, ten days after that i was sitting in four consecutive forty five minute rounds. My buddy who did Google said his hiring committee took longer to read his packet than Meta gave me to prep for the entire onsite lol.
The phone screen was on CoderPad. My language, my choice. Two medium problems, no code execution allowed, no pseudocode allowed. Meta in mod specific says write real code. I got a palindrome substring question and a frequency counting thing. The interviewer scored on four dimensions, problem solving, coding, verification, and communication. I caught an off-by-one in my second solution and she said "good catch" which aparent counts as a positive signal at Meta. Self-debugging matters here. That was the friendliest interaction in any of my FAANG phone screens sincer. My Google screener sat in total silence while i worked.
String manipulation, arrays, hash maps, binary trees, graphs. That probably covers eighty percent of what shows up on the Meta phone screen.
The onsite is four sessions of forty five minutes. Coding expects you to talk through your thought process and explain decisions as you write. Subarray problems, graph cycle detection, binary tree stuff, substring problems. Medium to hard and you should expect follow-ups that extend the original problem. System design is open-ended distributed systems for E5 and above, API design and client-server for E3 and E4. I made the mistake of prepping open-ended distributed system questions before my recruiter told me those are E5 level. Two wasted days because i nu am ask what level early enough.
Behavioral uses CAR format, Context Action Result, not STAR. I had STAR stories ready from Amazon prep and had to restructure five of them for Meta in two evenings. Should have had six CAR stories prepped before the recruiter call with real numbers in the results. "I cut release cycles from three weeks to four days" works. "I improved our process" nu.
In some loops Meta now includes a sixty minute round where they hand you AI-generated code and ask you to read fix and understand it. Not testing how you prompt AI. Testing fie ca can maintain engineering quality working with generated code. I nu am get this round but two friends who interviewed in January 2026 both described it as more like a code review than a coding test.
I ran InterviewMan during mock Meta rounds with two friends before my actual loop. It picked up the problem through audio, read CoderPad, and showed approaches in seconds. During behavioral it pulled a story from earlier in the conversation that matched what the interviewer was testing. Neither friend saw anything on shared screen, dock, or recording. InterviewMan works with CoderPad which matters for the phone screen. It covers system design and behavioral on the same plan at twelve bucks a month annual. I paid a hundred forty four dollars for a year of InterviewMan. Interview Coder wants two ninety nine a month for coding only. Leetcode Wizard is about fifty four for algorithms only. Meta hits you with coding and system design and behavioral and maybe the AI round all in one day. One twelve-dollar tool versus two ninety nine for just the coding portion, i nu poate make that math work in favor of Interview Coder.
57.000 de utilizatori, 20 plus functii stealth. Checked dock, lista de procese, Activity Monitor, inregistrare de ecran on CoderPad and Zoom and Meet. Nothing visible.
If i could redo one thing it would be starting system design and behavioral prep before the recruiter call. Meta moves fast. My ten days was not unusual and some people get less. Waiting until after the phone screen to start onsite prep is the biggest tactical mistake i see people make with Meta loops.
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