I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
Applied for an iOS position - was initially contacted via LinkedIn. Overall really enjoyed the process. Was quite drawn out due to personal circumstances. Interviewed from Australia, initially a phone screening interview (5 fairly basic iOS questions, understanding blocks and ARC), followed by 2 technical phone interviews (algorithmic coding questions plus verbal conversations around past work experience and also technical iOS questions.
After passing in these two phone interviews they flew me out to Menlo Park for a day of interviews. There were 5 interviews, one initial chat to warm up, talking about past experience, working relationships, etc, and a brief coding question on the whiteboard.
There were 3 more technical interviews of same format as the initial phone interviews. Plus one interview on designing scalable iOS app architecture for a simple app.
I really enjoyed the process and found the recruiters very helpful and friendly. Going and visiting Facebook HQ was great and as the reviews say all the people were great. Recommend doing for the experience. Getting an offer is tough. For me it came down to not being quick enough in answering the questions in the onsite technical interviews. They weren't overly difficult but they want you to move fast, and I tended to take my time and discuss with the interviewers which I believe worked against me. The other aspect was a general lack of experience (I have 18 months experience), and this reflected especially in the iOS design interview.
Hope this helps others considering going through the process! I definitely recommend it!
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
An interesting exhaustive phone number pad permutations question. Eg, if you touch one number on a keypad and then drag it around the keypad (horizontal and vertical movements only, no repeats), enumerate all the possible words you could create. These sorts of questions are common.
Recruiter call was pretty standard, first round was 2 Meta tagged LC mediums in 45 minutes. On-site was 2 coding sessions of 2 LC mediums, a system design interview and a behavioral interview with an engineering manager.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you answer if someone asks how long a deliverable or project will take?
The entire process usually takes 3–8 weeks, depending on scheduling and the specific role. Coding interviews heavily emphasize common DSA topics such as arrays, strings, trees, graphs, BFS/DFS, heaps, hash maps, and dynamic programming. System design becomes increasingly important for E4+ positions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and a target value, return the indices of two numbers that add up to the target
Unexpectedly, the first question in the technical round felt familiar. It was about finding a subset of strings with unique character concatenation — same problem I had worked through on PracHub a few days earlier. The interview included a recruiter screen followed by a rigorous pair of technical interviews where I tackled data structures and algorithms alongside system design concepts. After successfully answering a few more challenging DSA questions, I received an offer. The entire experience was intense but ultimately rewarding, and I happily accepted the position.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of strings, pick a subset whose concatenation contains no duplicate characters, and return the maximum possible length of that concatenation.