Meta Kafka Interview Questions 2026
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
5 real Kafka interview questions asked at Meta. Upvoted by engineers who cleared the loop. Covers System Design, Technical rounds.
5 questions
228 engineers asked
308 upvotes
Company: Meta
Technology: Kafka
All Kafka 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
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
Technical round
3-6 yearsKafka
You have a Kafka topic with 6 partitions and a consumer group with 10 consumer instances. What happens to the 4 extra consumers, and why is over-provisioning consumers like this a mistake?
↑ 23 upvotes · 12 engineers asked this · Senior SDE
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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.
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.
You have a Kafka topic with 6 partitions and a consumer group with 10 consumer instances. What happens to the 4 extra consumers, and why is over-provisioning consumers like this a mistake?
You have a Kafka topic with 6 partitions and a consumer group with 10 consumer instances. What happens to the 4 extra consumers, and why is over-provisioning consumers like this a mistake?