Phone screen:
Interviewer mentioned that optimal solutions were expected early on.
Q1: palindrome with at most one character removed
Q2: Merge sorted lists: Coded a nlogn solution, afterward was asked to find a better time solution. After some thinking I figured out the n+m solution and completed on time.
Received onsite invite after 4 hours of interviewing
Coding 1:
Q1: vertical order traversal of a binary tree (required O(n) space and time solution)-> first coded the nlogn time solution, was asked to optimized, then wrote a O(n) time solution
Q2: find the largest island in the grid with at most one 0 flipped to 1
Self Rating: Hire/Strong Hire
Coding 2:
Q1: Shortest Path in Binary Matrix: Interviewer did not provide full question, he wanted me to ask clarifying questions like should the path be shortest? wanted a optimal solution with minimal space complexity. Asked a lot of scenario based questions after coding, which I answered perfectly
Q2: Minimum Remove to Make Valid Parentheses (required O(n) space and time solution)-> started coding the O(n) space using stack, but mid way explained that I found a better solution and coded O(1) space solution
Self Rating: Hire/Strong Hire
Product architecture: Not available on HelloInterview, but on similar theme. Very easy if you went over the Hellointerview design questions.
Fn requirements were provided by interviewer with some cases missing and non-fn requirements were added by me. Provided APIs, DAU estimation, went into data schema for a while and jumped into design. The interview wanted me to only focus on Fn requirements, non-fn were not important unless fn requirement were satisfied completely. During design, there were a lot of back and forth questions about trade offs, 'why certain tech was used; pros and cons of each'. Then after Fn requirements were fully designed, I got a lot of questions again and one deep dive scenario which had question like "what if certain part of System gets additional data, now what how you handle duplicate?". I felt like the time is not enough to provide your solution, draw it on excalidraw and also answer the interviewer's questions which might not be related to the service you are trying to explain.
My 2 cents would be to get functional requirements designed as accurate and fast as you can. You can expect a lot of questions from interviewer on fn, non-fn and deep dives. They want to know every detail and reason behind your decisions.
Self Rating: Hire
Behavioral: Many questions based on my experience. Interviewer was an Engineering manager with lot of experience in Meta. He kept asking questions and dove deeper on each of my answers. I didn't know if the interviewer was satisfied with my responses.
Self Rating: Lean/Hire E4