Meta - Bangalore| E4 | Interview Experience
Current
Role - SDE 2 at MNC
experience - 4.5 years + (full-stack SWE)
I want to give back to this amazing community, which I am using for quite sometime now.
Had a chance to Interview with Meta for India position, the overall things took quite long, starting with assessment in September end 2025 to the final result (❌) in Feb 2026,
I had applied from career site, for various India and London E4 roles without much hope, since I had been rejected even with referral twice before.
One fine day, a recruiter reached out through email and scheduled a call to explain the process.
Some delays due to recruiters changing and leaving orgs, and some due to my commitments
The standard interview process for Meta,
online assessment -> Screening -> Full loop -> Team matching
They use coderpad for coding rounds,
excalidraw for HLD ( trivia - the founder was from Meta)
And zoom for meetings
It helps to get to understand the platforms well in advance
My total experience got very delayed because of recruiter changed 2 times, however it was okay with me since I was out of practice.
Online Assessment - Design an inmemory database of dictionary of tags, with some extensions to support TTL and backup. 90 mins
Recruiter had told that 3+ out 4 is enough to clear this.
This had 4 stages. I could only solve 3/4 with some idea for the 4th part which was extending for time based Backup of state due to time less, partly due to Java.
I was already considering shifting to python since coding in Java would be a disadvantage for DSA specially in Google Meta type 45 min rounds.
Question similar to one discussed on reddit "Meta online assessment test" on r/leetcode
I had around 1 month before the screening round,
-
I used a lot of neetcode videos on YT to revise and also shift to python.
-
Following leetcode discuss sections
-
Leetcode premium for Meta tagged questions (very useful)
Screening
45 mins - out of which 35 min to solve two questions
Q1 - minimum-remove-to-make-valid-parentheses
Solved and walkthrough stack approach,
Follow-up memory improvement, two pass, (straight and revsrse , thanks editorials)
Q2 - Max area of island in grid of 0,1
( feedback i recieved , didn't call out empty grid edge case, even though code should have handled)
Full loop interview
I wanted to use the time to prep, specially for AI- enabled coding interview and Product architecture
Process breakdown
. 1 Coding (45 mins)
· 1 Behavioral (45 mins)
. 1 AI-Enabled Coding (60 mins)
. 1 Product Architecture (45 mins)
Coding round (DSA) -
Q1 Some easy-medium question related to arrays (or string), don't remember 😓
Q2 Print out left and right view (boundary) of a tree,
Explained bfs and dfs approach, ended up coding the bfs solution since only boundary elements were needed
Questions were easy and Interviewer was also good,
Round went well,
LC tagged questions helped a lot
AI-Enabled Coding
Unit Tests and solving , related to this popular tagged Meta question
https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-length-of-a-concatenated-string-with-unique-characters/
Backtracking solution, Follow-up on optimizations,
One file with all 12k+ words from wordle was to be tested
I said about bit masking, but that would restrict our characters to english only, Interviewer was okay and discussion moved to other optimizations, like, iterative instead of recrusive (stack trace out of bound issue), graph based using some sort of DSU, and greedy(which would not work), but I was not able to implement those,
I though this round was bad even though I knew the question, Also i noticed a silly typo in the test fix later, but turns out the interviewer was satisfied.
Useful resources
OG - Hello Interview , They also have a good blog on AI-enabled coding interview
Used this platform (paid 1 week plan) for gettting comfortable with unit tests and random question - coditioning
There was a good medium blog, Although I could not really use Antigravity -
AI enabled coding interview by Dilip Kumar
Product Architecture
Q - Design FB post feed.
Focus is more on API's and user experience
They are not interested in HLD infra concepts like CAP theorem,
Entitites, APIs, Pagination and localization, is important.
I think when they were asking about supporting different types of file,I only said about using some content id, metadata, type but they might be looking for the PostBlock structure (check FB APIs for more context)
Overall this round was good
Useful resources
To get idea on Product Architecture
Useful video -
Meta Guide for System Design Vs Product Architecture Round
by Tech Leap channel on Youtube
Bheavioural
This was a discussion, The recruiter had given me some tips, on how to build the stories based on themes, using star method, and large scale and impact.
A few questions went well, however I had not prepared very well for this round, and being <1 years in my new org didn't help either.
Few questions I remember
Q - Something ... about dealing with conflict and multiple stakeholders
Q - What was one instance when you had to deal witha difficult feedback
Q - Tell me of a time when you had to naviagate through an impactful task with little to no direction
(I messed up this question, by first telling about random test migrations,(ramp up) later giving some generic answers, even though I had better stories)
Useful resources
Discuss with the recruiter for valuable tips, Make stories well in advance and do mock-ups so you are not lost in follow-ups.
Use the public resources well - ProdGen-prep-full-interview on meta careers site
Use exponent to schedule free mocks with industry leaders
Final Verdict
I finally got a rejectioin after lot of build-ups, lows and highs :P
The recruiter was really supportive, and although she said they are not giving detailed feedbacks these days, but hinted that my main reason was the behavioural round, soem signal was missing and that the bar is really high.
I was quite a bit tired after all this, but my learnings from this are:
- Don't underestimate - Bhevaioural (HM) round
- AI coding is the near future (no coding in the distant future),get comfortable to use AI as an assistant but keep steering, just like at work these days
- Product architecture is ambigious but easier than difficult infra concepts (think count-min-sketch :P) , but it helps if you think like a UI UX developer/designer
Overall, it was a great experience and they said we can apply again from the date of last screening, but at this point I have stopped dreaming, because of the many times, I have failed
Trying to enjoy and focus on my work.
Keep hustling 💪 !! Cheers