Meta Interview Process 2026 — Rounds, Tips & Questions
Everything about the Meta interview process: rounds, what each round tests, difficulty level, and 21 real questions asked by engineers who cleared the loop.
Interview Rounds at Meta
- Recruiter call
- Phone screen x2
- Onsite x5 (Coding, System Design, Behavioural)
Meta values speed of execution. System Design rounds often involve social graph or feed ranking problems. Behavioural rounds use the "impact" framework.
Real Questions Asked at Meta
Design Instagram feed — a user follows 500 people, each posts 2-3 times daily. How do you generate and serve a personalized, ranked feed at scale?
What is the difference between useMemo and useCallback? Give concrete examples of when each actually helps vs. when it hurts.
Your fine-tuned LLM performs well on your eval set but users report degraded responses 2 weeks after deployment. What is happening and what do you do?
What is the difference between RANK(), DENSE_RANK(), and ROW_NUMBER()? Give a real use case for each.
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete data. Meta values moving fast — how did you balance the need for speed against the risk of being wrong? What would you do differently today?
Design Facebook's News Feed ranking system. How do you score posts from thousands of friends and pages? Cover: candidate generation, feature extraction, ML ranking model, how you handle near-real-time freshness, and edge vs server-side ranking for mobile clients.
Design Facebook Live - a system to stream live video from one user to potentially millions of concurrent viewers with low latency. Cover: ingest pipeline, transcoding, CDN edge caching, adaptive bitrate, and how you handle a celebrity going live.
Design Instagram Stories. A story disappears after 24 hours and is shown in a ring around profile pictures. Cover: upload pipeline, storage with TTL, efficient delivery to followers, and view count tracking at scale.
Design WhatsApp's end-to-end encrypted messaging system. How do you exchange keys, store messages server-side without reading them, and handle multi-device sync? Cover the Signal Protocol basics.
Given a social graph, find all users within K hops of a given user. Implement BFS with a visited set. Then discuss how you would scale this to Meta's 3 billion user graph using partitioning.
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