Status: Working as Staff/Principal Software Engineer in SFO.
Position: Senior Software Engineer (E5)
Location: Menlo Park, CA

Phone Interview: (45 mins)

Quick intro about 2-3 mins

1. Given a list of n points in 3D space, return the k closest points to the origin (0, 0 ,0)

class Point(Object):
    self.x = 1
    self.y = 1
    self.z = 1

points = [
  Point,
  Point, 
    …
]

2. Given a mapping from digits to list of letters and a string of digits of arbitrary length, determine all possible ways to replace the digits with corresponding letters from the map.

https://leetcode.com/problems/letter-combinations-of-a-phone-number

Solved both on time and there was no question on complexity. What they look for is your algorithm to solve the problem and speed coding.

Within 3 days recruiter called and informed that i made it in the phone interview and shared materials for onsite interview.

Onsite Interviews:

1. Career + Coding Round:
Quick Intro and then typical CF questions
1. Why leaving current company and why FB?
2. Conflict resolution with peer and manager?
3. Past challenges?
4. if you go back and redo something, what would you do?
5. Regret and why?
Coding: Minimum Size Subarray Sum (LC Med)
https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-size-subarray-sum/description/

2. Coding Round:
Brief introduction - 3-5 mins
A quick design dicussion of one of my side projects. - 10 mins
Coding: Meeting Rooms II (LC-Med)
https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/description/
Completed most of it but one edge condition was missing.

Lunch:
A lady from ML infra team took me out for lunch. She talked mostly about the area of the work i had mentioned on my resume.

3. Coding Round:
Quick intro - 3 mins
Coding: Is Graph Bipartite? (LC-Med)
https://leetcode.com/problems/is-graph-bipartite/description/
Took lot of time to finish this but still missing some edge condition.

4. System Design Round:
Quick intro - 3 mins
Question: Design a leaderboard for a mobile game
Went well. Asked clarifying questions and provided solutions. He was looking fro details and correctness.

Overall, coding didnt go well but System design was good. Recruiter came back in three days and asked to try after a year.

TIPS:

1. Practice coding fast. FB wants people who code really fast.
2. Clarify upfront on number of questions in coding rounds. Some interviewers have two med or one hard. it completely depends on the interviewer.
3. Ask lot of clarifying questions and make sure to provide correct and relevant details to the solution.