Meta Distributed Systems Interview Questions 2026
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
8 real Distributed Systems interview questions asked at Meta. Upvoted by engineers who cleared the loop. Covers System Design, Technical rounds.
8 questions
419 engineers asked
573 upvotes
Company: Meta
Technology: Distributed Systems
All Distributed Systems Questions Asked at Meta
Meta
Hard
System Design round
Distributed SystemsKafkaMicroservices
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.
↑ 83 upvotes · 81 engineers asked this · SDE2
Meta
Hard
Technical round
JavaPythonDistributed Systems
Given Meta's social graph, find all friend-of-friend recommendations for a user that are not already friends.
Discuss BFS at scale, how to prune the search space, and how to rank recommendations by mutual friend count efficiently.
↑ 54 upvotes · 54 engineers asked this · SDE2
Meta
Hard
System Design round
Distributed SystemsKafkaAWS
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.
↑ 71 upvotes · 48 engineers asked this · SDE2
Meta
Hard
System Design round
Distributed SystemsKafka
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.
↑ 65 upvotes · 43 engineers asked this · SDE2
Meta
Hard
System Design round
Distributed SystemsKafkaRedis
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.
↑ 66 upvotes · 44 engineers asked this · SDE2
Meta
Hard
System Design round
6–10 YearsSystem DesignDistributed Systems
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?
↑ 148 upvotes · 119 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Meta
Hard
System Design round
4-8 yearsSystem DesignDistributed Systems
Design the "who viewed your profile" feature for a professional network with 500M users. Discuss write amplification, retention policy, and privacy controls for who can see the data.
↑ 47 upvotes · 16 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
Meta
Hard
Technical round
5-9 yearsJavaDistributed Systems
Given a social graph, find the shortest chain of mutual connections between two users (like LinkedIn's "degrees of connection"), and explain how bidirectional BFS improves performance over a single-direction BFS at this scale.
↑ 39 upvotes · 14 engineers asked this · Staff Engineer
Practice these questions with AI feedback
Get instant grading on your answers, identify your weak areas, and generate a personalised 14-day study plan — all free.
Build my study plan →
More Meta Questions
Browse by company
Frequently asked questions
Design Facebook's News Feed ranking system.
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.
Given Meta's social graph, find all friend-of-friend recommendations for a user that are not already friends.
Given Meta's social graph, find all friend-of-friend recommendations for a user that are not already friends.
Discuss BFS at scale, how to prune the search space, and how to rank recommendations by mutual friend count efficiently.
Design Facebook Live - a system to stream live video from one user to potentially millions of concurrent viewers with low latency.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
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?
Design the "who viewed your profile" feature for a professional network with 500M users. Discuss write amplification, retention policy, and privacy controls for who can see the data.
Design the "who viewed your profile" feature for a professional network with 500M users. Discuss write amplification, retention policy, and privacy controls for who can see the data.
Given a social graph, find the shortest chain of mutual connections between two users (like LinkedIn's "degrees of connection"), and explain how bidirectional BFS improves performance over a single-direction BFS at this scale.
Given a social graph, find the shortest chain of mutual connections between two users (like LinkedIn's "degrees of connection"), and explain how bidirectional BFS improves performance over a single-direction BFS at this scale.