Hey everyone,
I recently finished my full interview loop with Meta for software product role in Bangalore and unfortunately got rejected at the end. Still, I wanted to share my full experience since posts like these really helped me during preparation.
Education: IIT Kanpur
Current Company: Product-based startup
Experience: 2.5+ years full-time
Internships: 6 months + 2 months
📍 Recruiter Reach-out (25th Sept)
A recruiter contacted me via LinkedIn and asked to schedule a call.
We had a detailed conversation where she explained:
The role and expectations
The full hiring process
The elimination stage
Timeline, interview structure, and prep tips
The elimination stage consisted of three parts:
- Live DSA Elimination Interview (Zoom)
- Hard DSA Online Assessment
This one was genuinely tough. There were 4 questions, and I barely managed to finish them in time.
- Behavioral Assessment
This had situational questions like:
“In this scenario, what would you do?”
You answer using Strongly Agree / Agree / Neutral / Disagree / Strongly Disagree.
It’s simple overall, but I’d highly recommend understanding Meta’s values beforehand — it helps align your responses.
🧩 Elimination Interview (45 minutes)
I got two DSA questions and managed to solve both within ~20 minutes:
Ocean View Buildings (standard LC problem)
Pattern–Target Matching, where repeated characters can be removed to match the pattern
The interviewer was nice.
Two days later, I was told I cleared the elimination stage and could schedule the full loop.
I booked my interviews from 27th–31st October 2025.
🔥 Full Interview Loop (4 Rounds)
Every round was 45 minutes, except the AI-enabled round which was 60 minutes.
Each round also included:
5 minutes intro
5 minutes at the end to ask questions
1️⃣ Round 1 — Behavioral (45 minutes)
Standard Meta behavioral questions:
Project I’m proud of
Conflict with a teammate
Time I disagreed with someone
Time I had to follow someone else’s opinion
Ownership and failures
The interviewer asked rapid follow-up questions, which made it harder to strictly follow the STAR framework, but overall I handled it fine.
Self-verdict: Hire
2️⃣ Round 2 — Product Architecture (45 minutes)
Since the role was full-stack, I got a Product Architecture round instead of classical SD.
Prompt: Design an Online Food Delivery App
I followed my complete framework:
Clarifications
High-level architecture
Entities
Services
API design
Functional + Non-functional requirements
Scalability + edge cases
Follow-up questions
This felt like my strongest round. The interviewer seemed impressed.
Self-verdict: Hire → Strong Hire
3️⃣ Round 3 — AI-Enabled Coding Round (60 minutes)
This is a new Meta format, introduced around October 2025.
I received a partially built game scenario and had to:
Understand the existing codebase
Fill in missing logic
Optimize a final strategy
The interviewer was very friendly and helpful.
Since this format was new, I didn’t have much prior information, but still did well.
Self-verdict: Leaning Hire → Hire
4️⃣ Round 4 — Pure DSA (45 minutes)
Two coding problems:
LRU Cache
String manipulation — check if a string can be made palindrome after deleting certain characters
I explained brute force → optimized approach for both, wrote clean code, and covered edge cases.
Self-verdict: Hire → Strong Hire
❌ Final Result
I was honestly expecting a positive result based on how the interviews went… but after 10–12 days, I received the rejection email.
and they did not share any specific feedback,
it would be really great if they shared.
It stung, because I felt I performed well in most rounds — but that’s how interviews go sometimes.
let me know if you have any question ,