The most effective way to prepare for a Meta interview is to practice real Meta interview questions. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cheatsheet for your Meta interview, so you know the answers to questions before they’re asked? Luckily, this cheat sheet exists–Meta published it themselves. Meta outlines common interview questions, the values they’re looking for, and the interview process on their own site. Meta employees and candidates have shared real Meta interview questions and the Meta interview process all over the internet on sites like Glassdoor and LeetCode. But how do you know which questions will actually be asked? We’ve compiled the most common Meta interview questions and answers so you can go into your interview with confidence.
How Not to Answer Meta Interview Questions
One of the worst mistakes candidates make is just casually scanning Meta interview questions online before their interview. They study questions carefully, but don’t prepare answers–they plan to “wing” their answers. But Meta interviewers certainly don’t have such a casual attitude. They’ll carefully note your responses and meticulously review what you shared.
While you shouldn’t memorize interview responses word-for-word, you should have a pitch prepared along with common interview responses. As a Software Engineer at Meta and a mentor at Pathrise, William Spalding emphasizes coming to behavioral interviews prepared with examples from your previous experience. “ Meta employees like William, landed jobs by acing Meta interview questions, demonstrating their soft skills, technical skills, and cultural alignment with Meta.
If you’re preparing for a Meta interview, don’t just read the questions in this article. Actually write your own response (or modify our example answers), then practice the answers aloud with a friend or in the mirror. You will absolutely be asked some of the Meta interview questions in this guide.
Common Meta Interview Questions from Their Own Website
Although not easy to find, Meta has published an extensive outline of their interview process and even PDF guides to preparing for their loop interviews. In addition to extensive prep guides, they offer outlines for each step of the interview process, from the initial technical screen to the full loop interview. Meta offers guides on a variety of roles, including software engineering, product management, and design. Advice for succeeding in behavioral interviews is the same across roles.
- Use the S.T.A.R. (Situation, Task, Actions, Results) method to mentally organization your thoughts. This will provoke a well thought-out and chronological action of events. Easy to describe, easy to follow.
- 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.
Meta wants candidates to arrive prepared and communicate their experiences as effectively as possible. After all, hiring managers want to hire the best candidate possible–not the candidate who just happens to excel at interviews. To level the playing field, Meta shares more tips to prepare. However, not all the tips are in your best interest.
- Know yourself. Take the time to review your own resume as your interviewer will almost certainly ask questions about key events in your work history.
- 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 and discussing how you learned, improved and grew from your past experiences is valued.
- Be yourself. This means being open and honest about your successes and failures.
- Be humble and focus on teamwork, leadership and mentorship qualities.
- Familiarize yourself with our six core values. These values influence how we work together to fulfill our mission of bringing the world closer together.
Half of this advice is excellent, especially researching Meta and familiarizing yourself with their core values. But the advice on “be yourself”, “be humble”, and “be honest” is necessarily in your best interest. This advice isn’t technically harmful. Of course, honesty and humility are important–but candidates are more likely to be too humble than to be arrogant. You can “be yourself” by sharing your unique personality and hobbies, when asked. But “being yourself” onsite at Meta’s highly exclusive campuses does not mean “being yourself” chatting with your friends. It’s also not the time to self-deprecate or be overly humble. Share the impact you’ve had in past roles and how you can make an impact at Meta.
Meta is seeking the candidate who best communicates their skills, experience, and cultural fit. While you should never try to alter your personality or pretend to be someone you’re not, you should practice proper interview etiquette. When you prepare an answer to Meta’s “tell me about yourself” questions, highlight skills and experience that fit the job listing. Whenever possible, you should also communicate experiences that demonstrate Apple’s values.
Meta makes it clear that they ask questions based on past experiences–they even ask you to prepare some. This means STAR interview technique (situation, task, action, result) will be the most critical step to succeeding in any interview. Here are behavioral Meta interview questions from their own site.
- What are some of the best things you’ve built?
- What are you most proud of?
- What could you have done better?
- What were some excellent collaborations you’ve had?
- Tell me about a time when you advocated for and pushed your own ideas forward despite opposition.
- How do you deal with conflict?
- How do you like to give and receive feedback?
- What kinds of technologies are you most excited about?
These types of questions will come up in almost any interview you will ever have or have had. But since these questions are so common, we won’t analyze them in-depth here. Check out our full guides on answering “tell me about yourself” questions and “what areas do you need to develop further” questions–these simple questions come up in almost every interview. Instead, we want to focus on technical and behavioral interview questions specific to Meta.
Behavioral Meta Interview Questions
Half or more of your Meta interview questions will probably be behavioral. But the most critical behavioral questions will be specific to Meta as a company. These questions are designed to assess how you think and relate to Meta–their culture, mission, and values. While these questions don’t necessarily require you to know anything about Meta, sharing Meta-specific information will certainly help you prove your genuine interest and culture fit.
1. Why do you want to work for Meta?
This is your chance to demonstrate cultural alignment with Meta and show you’ve done your research. While you obviously shouldn’t lie, prepare a thoughtful answer that’s connected to Meta’s stated cultural values.
Based on our data, the most effective way to answer is to explain why you’re a good candidate and how you connect to the company mission, values, products, and goals. This is especially important in Meta interviews, since cultural fit behavioral questions usually make up half or more of Meta interview questions. Check out our full guide to answering “Why do you want to work here” questions because they’ll come up in almost every interview. However, your answer should depend on the company.
Our answer:
“That’s a great question. I want to work at Meta because I feel that our goals align. I have always been passionate about connecting creators with their audience to build community, just like how Meta’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
In my past role as a product manager at Etsy, I worked to build streamlined back-end functionality for millions of creators that allowed them to more easily upload their products and interact with customers to build a community. The intuitive updates and accessible products I managed increased creator NPS by 60% and led to a 45% increase in creator retention. Engagement with their customer community shot up as well.
With my experience connecting Etsy creators to customers by building exciting new UX features, I know I can provide valuable input to the team so that Meta can continue to connect people. In addition, I know that as a company Meta holds itself and team members to high standards, which are extremely important to me in my future role. I am looking to join a technology company that moves fast and looks toward the future. While I loved my prior roles, I want to have a bigger, more long-term impact–Meta is the perfect place for my values and skills.”
2. Tell me about a time you led your team or took extra responsibilities
Plenty of Meta’s behavioral questions focus on leadership. In fact, this portion of the interview is sometimes called the “leadership interview”. Two of Meta’s values focus on leadership, so questions assessing leadership should be expected.
However, this still is an example of a typical behavioral question that relies on sharing a past work experience. The most effective way to answer these questions is with the STAR method (situation, task, action, result). Since Meta stated values include being direct, showing respect to colleagues, and having a sense of responsibility for collective success, you can include those into your answer if possible.
Our answer:
“When I was a designer at Amazon Prime, I spearheaded the launch of the store feature to offer in-app purchases and increase revenue. I worked cross functionally with the software team and our copywriters to craft the page layout and user experience. When taking charge of a project and team, I think it’s important to carefully listen to each member of your team. That’s why I scheduled one-on-ones with my copywriter and software developer to understand their perspectives and challenges. Communication was also key–at the start of the project, I laid out a clear timeline for each task to be completed. This also allowed us to move quickly, since the sooner we rolled out the store, the sooner Amazon could increase revenue. The team’s hard work paid off—we launched the store feature a week before schedule, resulting in increased sales and increased watchtime by 8% from paid movies not previously on the platform.”
3. Tell me about a time when you had to work under pressure or a tight deadline.
This is another open-ended experience based question that should be answered with STAR. However, “deadline” and “pressure” should immediately make you think about Meta’s cultural value of moving fast. We recommend sharing a situation from a previous work experience that demonstrates your moving fast, living in the future, and respecting your colleagues.
Our answer:
“As a UX intern at Roblox, I had a tight 2 week deadline to revamp the UX for the homepage to highlight Roblox’s live streaming capabilities. Looking to the future, I wanted to make sure that users were consistently shown new and exciting live streams going forward. So I created a “today’s picks” of live streams that displayed popular live streams based on the user’s previous viewing history. After meeting with the dev team, I also increased the size of livestream thumbnails to 16:9 to make them the most prominent on the home page. By moving quickly and working cross functionally, I was able to finish in just 10 days. Our homepage revamp increased livestream views from the homepage by 62% and added almost a thousand hours of watchtime.”
You can use the same STAR method to answer these other common Meta interview questions:
- Give an example of a difficult customer interaction and how you worked through it. What was the outcome?
- What are your strengths and weaknesses?
- Describe a time when you faced a conflict with a team member.
- How does teamwork come into play in your current role?
- Share examples of how you manage difficult stakeholders
- Describe a project you were responsible for or led.
- Describe a time where you influenced an outcome.
- How do you deal with ambiguity and setbacks?
- Tell me about a time when you have gone above and beyond for a client.
- Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision.
- Tell me about a time you collaborated with a cross functional team
- How do you handle stressful situations?
- Tell me about a time when you wanted to change something that was outside of your regular scope of work.
- Tell me about a time you had to make a fast decision and live with the results.
- What project are you most proud of and why?
- Tell me about a time you had to make a quick decision.
- Tell me about a time a project took longer as expected.
- Tell me about a situation where two teams couldn’t agree on a path forward.
- Describe a situation when you made a mistake, and what you learned from it.
- Tell me about some constructive feedback you received from a manager or a peer
- Tell me about a skill set that you observed in a peer or mentor that you want to develop in the next six months.
Technical Meta Interview Questions from LeetCode
Unlike companies like Amazon or Netflix, Meta’s hiring is centralized, not team-specific. Meta’s interview process is the same for all teams. Not that you choose your team–Meta will match you to a team after you’re hired. Most, if not all, of your interviewers will never see you again.
- In the initial phone interview, Meta usually asks 2 medium questions from Leetcode.
- Usually, the medium Leetcode questions are questions tagged under Meta. If not, the question will usually come from the top 20 Leetcode questions.
- In the loop interviews, Meta also asks Leetcode style questions. But they’re often customized by Meta.
As of Summer 2024, Meta is hiring far more software engineers than any other tech company. Possibly as high as 10x more. While Amazon and Netflix are hiring some engineers, they’re not hiring anywhere near the scale that Meta is hiring. As other companies lay off talent, Meta seems to be one of the only (if not the only) top tech company hiring. That means they can be choosy and demand software engineering candidates jump through hoops. However, this also means they’re hiring is standardized and easier to prepare for. Practice questions are easy to find.
A GitHub user published a list of the most common Meta interview questions from Leetcode. A 2024 Leetcode user compiled a list of system design Leetcode questions used in Meta’s onsite interview. Other meta interview candidates have confirmed that these questions came up in their interviews. 2022 users on Blind also made a list of Meta interview questions from Leetcode,
though questions may have changed since then. Meta often takes questions from Leetcode’s top 20 list as well. We still recommend paying for Leetcode to practice for technical interview questions at Meta. But you can’t pay for Leetcode, you can use these free lists. We’ve also included some of the most common LeetCode style questions in Meta interview questions below.
- Top K Frequent Elements
- Design web crawler
- Design YouTube
- Verifying an alien dictionary
- Minimum remove to make valid parenthesis
- K closest to origin
- Product of array
- Remove invalid parenthesis
- Valid palindrome II
- Subray sum equals K
- Integer to English words
- Add strings
Technical Meta Interview Questions for Software Engineers
Beside Leetcode questions, here are some of the most common Meta interview questions asked in software engineering interviews.
- Determine if the sum of three integers is equal to a given value
- Design Facebook Messenger.
- Given the root of a binary tree, imagine yourself standing on the right side and return the values of the nodes you can see ordered from top to bottom.
- Given an integer array number and an integer k, return the k most frequent elements. You may return the answer in any order.
- Given a string S and a string T, find the minimum window in S which will contain all the characters in T in complexity O(n).
- Given an array of strings strs, group the anagrams together.
- Given a string s containing just the characters ‘(‘, ‘)’, ‘{‘, ‘}’, ‘[‘ and ‘]’, determine if the input string is valid.
- Given a singly linked list L: L0?L1?…?Ln-1?Ln, reorder it to: L0?Ln?L1?Ln-1?L2?Ln-2?…
- Given two arrays, write a function to compute their intersection.
- Given an array nums of n integers, are there elements a, b, c in nums such that a + b + c = 0? Find all unique triplets in the array which gives the sum of zero.
- Design WhatsApp.
- Given a binary tree, you need to compute the length of the diameter of the tree.
- Serialize and deserialize a binary tree.
- Given a binary tree, find the maximum path sum.
- Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i. If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.
- Given an input string (s) and a pattern (p), implement regular expression matching with support for ‘.’ and ‘*’.
- Given a signed 32-bit integer x, return x with its digits reversed. If reversing x causes the value to go outside the signed 32-bit integer range [-231, 231 – 1], return 0.
- Given the root of a binary tree, return the in order traversal of its nodes’ values.
- Given the root of a binary search tree and an integer k, return the kth smallest value (1-indexed) of all the values of the nodes in the tree.
- Design Instagram.
- Given two integer arrays nums1 and nums2, return an array of their intersection. Each element in the result must be unique and you may return the result in any order.
- A linked list is given such that each node contains an additional random pointer that could point to any node in the list or null. Return a deep copy of the list.
- You are given an array of integers numbers, there is a sliding window of size k, which moves from the very left of the array to the very right. You can only see the k numbers in the window. Each time the sliding window moves right by one position. Return the max sliding window.
- Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [starting, ending], merge all overlapping intervals and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input.
- Print a binary tree by vertical level order, like: 1 2 4 3 5 print : 3 2 1 5 4.
- Simple heap search algorithm implementation.
- How would you find out the number of cars passing on a busy bridge?
- Standard rotated binary search question. You have a sorted array that has been shifted/cycled, perform a search on it
- Retrieve words from a dictionary that are made up of a subsequence of characters in an input string (i.e. given input “ABAT,” matching words may include “BAT” and “TAB” while non-matching words may be “BART” or “BAR”).
- Add 2 binary numbers (input as a string).
- What is a memory-efficient way to store a vector of integers? Follow-up question: using your proposed data structure, find an algorithm with constant memory usage to calculate the dot product of two vectors.
- Print a binary tree in level order. Then print the tree in level order, but using DFS
- Obj-C: 5 multiple choice questions.
- Be familiar with NSSet and NSOrderedSet. These data structures are more performant than NSArrays for some operations.
- Display the sorted output of a merge of any number of sorted arrays. Then do it again, but more efficiently.
- Get the n-th Fibonacci number
- Find the depth of a binary tree
- Merge two arrays
- Reverse a doubly linked list.
- 3 sum and pow().
- Reverse string pair words that are anagrams of each other.
- Given an array of integers, find three that sum to a given value. Alternately, find all triplets that sum to the given value.
- Implement a simple function on an empty paper. Each type of variable (ex. int, double) and conditional/iterative statement has to be chosen carefully
- Implement a square root function.
- Find all possible permutations for a string and find an element’s position in a slightly sorted array in the most efficient way (you have something like [5,6,7,1,2,3] and you want the position for “2” -> you use a binary search algorithm).
- Shortest route between airports.
- Design a system to detect homework copying, which means input two strings and a integer K, if there is a common substring of them having a length larger than K, return true, otherwise return false.
- Implement strstr(), and a follow up question is how to speed it up.
- If you could change something about Facebook, what would it be?
- Find the minimum in a rotated sorted array and find the minimum element. Assume no duplicate exists in the array.
- Move all non-zero elements into the front of the array.
- Given a matrix, calculate the sum of a sub matrix given the start and end indices of the submatrix.
Meta Interview Questions for Data Scientists
Data Scientist candidates can also expect Leetcode style Meta interview questions. Here are some examples of other types of questions data scientist candidates encounter.
- A Facebook Groups product manager decides to add threading to comments on group posts. Comments per user increase by 10%, but posts go down 2%. Why would that be? What metrics would prove your hypotheses?
- How can Facebook figure out when users falsify their attended schools?
- If 70% of Facebook users on iOS use Instagram, but only 35% of Facebook users on Android use Instagram, how would you investigate the discrepancy?
- Write a SQL query to create a histogram of the number of comments per user in the month of January 2020. Assume bin buckets class intervals of one.
- What do you think the distribution of time spent per day on Facebook looks like? What metrics would you use to describe that distribution?
- We use people to rate ads. There are two types of raters, random and independent, from our point of view: 80% of raters are careful, and they rate an ad as good (60% chance) or bad (40% chance). 20% of raters are lazy, and they rate every ad as good (100% chance). Suppose we have 100 raters, each rating one ad independently. What’s the expected number of good ads?
- You’ve been asked to generate a machine learning model that can map the nicknames of people using Facebook. How do you go about designing this model?
- A product manager has asked you to develop a method to match users to their siblings on Facebook. How would you evaluate a method or algorithm to match users with their siblings? What metrics might you use?
- In Mexico, if you take the mean and the median age, which one will be higher and why?
- If you draw 2 cards from a shuffled 52 card deck, what is the probability that you’ll have a pair?
- Given a table that each day shows who was active in the system and a table that tracks ongoing user status, write a procedure that will take each day’s active table and pass it into the ongoing daily tracking table. Possible states are: * user stayed (yesterday yes, today yes) * user churned (yesterday yes, today no) * user revived (yesterday no, today yes) * user new (yesterday null, today yes) Note: you’ll want to spot and account for the undefined state.
- How can Facebook figure out when users falsify their attended schools?
- SQL queries with basic group by self joins and inner queries. The problem could be solved by analytical queries.
- SQL and why is the number of likes increasing?
- There’s a game where you are given two fair six-sided dice and asked to roll. If the sum of the values on the dice equals seven, then you win $21. However, you must pay $5 to play each time you roll both dice. Do you play this game? And in follow-up: What is the probability of making money from this game?
- We at Facebook would like to develop a way to estimate the month and day of people’s birthdays, regardless of whether people give us that information directly. What methods would you propose, and what data would you use, to help with that task?
- Imagine we see a lot of users filling up a form but not submitting it, why would this be the case and how would you use data to figure it out?
- Given a list A of objects and another list B which is identical to A except that one element is removed, find that removed element.
- How would you measure the health of Mentions, Facebook’s app for celebrities? How can FB determine if it’s worth it to keep using it? If a celebrity starts to use Mentions and begins interacting with their fans more, what part of the increase can be attributed to a celebrity using Mentions, and what part is just a celebrity wanting to get more involved in fan engagement?
- There is a table that tracks every time a user turns a feature on or off, with columns for user_id, action (“on” or “off), date, and time. How many users turned the feature on today? How many users have ever turned the feature on? In a table that tracks the status of every user every day, how would you add today’s data to it?
- If 70% of Facebook users on iOS use Instagram, but only 35% of Facebook users on Android use Instagram, how would you investigate the discrepancy?
- How do you measure newsfeed health?
- If a PM says that they want to double the number of ads in Newsfeed, how would you figure out if this is a good idea or not?
- We have two options for serving ads within Newsfeed: 1) out of every 25 stories, 1 will be an ad, or 2) every story has a 4% chance of being an ad. For each option, what is the expected number of ads shown in 100 news stories? If we go with option 2, what is the chance a user will be shown only a single ad in 100 stories? What about no ads at all?
- How do you map nicknames (Pete, Andy, Nick, Rob, etc) to real names?
- Facebook sees that likes are up 10% year after year, why could this be?
- How many high schools that people have listed on their profiles are real? How do we find out, and deploy at scale, a way of finding invalid schools?
- How would you choose emotions in like/dislike systems and any problems in the A/B test?
- What experiment would you run to implement new features on Facebook?
- Given a series of tables; write the SQL code you would need to count subpopulations through joins.
- What is the expectation of the variance?
- How do you determine a product’s success and scenarios that involve you to code/query using SQL/R/Python and analyze data sets.
- The success ratio of sending messages given sent and receive tables.
- Make a histogram of 2 variables.
- We have a product that is getting used differently by two different groups. What is your hypothesis about why and how would you go about testing it?
- Given a specific product, come up with some potential improvements and design a series of experiments for testing/implementing these changes.
Meta Interview Questions for Design
Meta interview questions for designers will usually be less technical than other roles. Interview questions put a heavy emphasis on your portfolio. However, candidates will still be expected to answer technical questions beyond their portfolio. These technical design questions have come up in past Meta interviews.
- How would you improve Facebook events?
- Redesign the ATM.
- Design a library book rental delivery app.
- Design a scheduling app.
- The bookmarking icon is the same as the collections icon. Why do you think they made them the same icon?
- Walk me through Google Maps. What works, what doesn’t?
- Tell me the high-level thinking behind your application.
- Which Facebook product do you want to work for?
- Tell me about [project from your portfolio]. What was the goal, what were the challenges, what was your specific role, etc. (The intent is to get a better understanding of your design work/process, intentionality, and overall awareness.)
- How did you achieve this goal with your design decision?
- How would you make an app that helps you decide which gift to buy?
- What does Airbnb do? Why do you think they decided to change the search bar?
- Do you use data for design decisions?
- Choose an app that you like and use a lot, describe how you can redesign it and why.
- Choose an app and find UX issues that you might have solved differently
- If you need to add a “social-based” feature to an app, how would you do that?
- Present on past UX experiences.
- Should Facebook continue to add features or rely on 3rd party apps?
- What does the Back button do when you open the search bar?
- What would you fix if you got to lead the design team for X company?
- Redesign a TV remote.
Pathrise is a career accelerator that helps people land their dream job in tech at top tech companies like Meta. Our expert mentors like William have experience at top FAANG companies, having experience intertwining candidates and acing interviews themselves. Our mentors work 1-on-1 with you to help you optimize your resume, ace interviews, and negotiate a higher salary. On average, our fellows double their interview scores and get 3x more interviews. It’s free until you land a job.
Join Today
Check out our other Interview Questions to prep for your next interview:
- Behavioral Questions
- Startup Interview Questions
- Techical Prep
- Industry Tracks
- FAANG Companies
