Meta software engineering interview questions

The Process

Five stages, and your level is not decided until the fourth

01

15 to 30 minPhone call

Recruiter screen

Meta hires to the company, not to a team, so there is no manager on this call and no role to discuss. Your level is set after the loop, not before it.

Do not chase a level on this call.
The recruiter has no say in it. Level comes out of the debrief packet, so anything said now is a guess that binds nobody.
Ask which pipeline you are in.
Product and infrastructure are separate tracks, and the track decides whether your design round is Product Architecture or System Design.
Give a range wide enough to cover two bands.
Pay is banded by level and the level is unknown until the debrief, so one number quietly anchors you to whichever band comes back.

02

45 minCoderPad

Technical screen

Two problems in about thirty five minutes of actual coding, in a pad with no compiler and no test runner. The interviewer grades the code exactly as you typed it.

You cannot run anything you write.
Walking a small input through your own code by hand is the only evidence the interviewer gets that it works at all.
Two problems means one is not a pass.
Finishing the first cleanly and never reaching the second reads as a fail. Say your time split out loud and then hold to it.
Go to the optimal solution first.
Meta expects the good answer inside the time box. Talking through brute force before improving it burns the half hour you do not have.

03

4 to 5 roundsOne dayAI round, E5 to E7

The full loop

Two coding rounds, one design round and one behavioural. Since October 2025, candidates at E5 to E7 and M2 get one AI-enabled coding round with a model picker, scored on how hard you interrogate what it writes.

The design round splits by track.
Infrastructure roles get System Design, product roles get Product Architecture. Same four scoring criteria, very different questions.
The AI round scores judgement, not speed.
Accepting generated code without reading it is the documented way to fail. Say what you checked, what you kept and what you threw out.
The behavioural round carries a scorecard.
Conflict, ambiguity, growth and results are each written up separately, and one thin answer can hold up an otherwise clean loop.

04

1 to 2 weeksWritten feedbackNo candidate input

Debrief and level

Every interviewer files a score and a confidence rating before anyone talks. Meta is one of the few companies that decides your level here rather than before the loop.

Down levelling is the common middle result.
A strong loop argued at the wrong band comes back as an E4 offer rather than a rejection, with the lower number already written in.
Confidence ratings weigh as much as scores.
An interviewer who liked you but marked low confidence damages the packet more than one weak round does, and you never hear about it.
Ask what the packet said, not whether you passed.
Recruiters will usually summarise the round by round feedback, which is the only signal you get about which band you were argued at.

05

2 to 8 weeksManager calls

Team matching

You clear the bar before you have a team. Matching is a run of calls with managers who hold headcount at your level, and nothing starts until one of them takes you.

A passed loop can quietly go stale.
Match windows run on a clock. If no team takes you inside it the packet expires and the whole loop has to be sat again.
Managers see your band, not your rounds.
They are picking from a pool of people at the same level, so the conversation is what you want to build, not how the loop went.
Choose the org before the product.
Ads, Infrastructure and Reality Labs run different promotion clocks and different on call loads. That choice sets your next two years.

Levels and Pay

Base barely moves after E5. The stock does all the work

Pick a level to see how the package splits, what changes by city, and what the loop actually asks of you at that band.

Menlo Park

New York

Seattle

London

Level	Experience	Total comp
Software EngineerE3Entry	0 to 2 yrs	~$198K
Software EngineerE4Mid	2 to 5 yrs	~$310K
Senior EngineerE5Senior	5 to 8 yrs	~$480K
Staff EngineerE6Staff	8 to 12 yrs	~$690K
Senior Staff EngineerE7Sr Staff	12+ yrs	~$1.25M

Live Question Feed

What Meta is asking right now

40 questions · new ones added every 7 days

40 Verified

CODING

Given an array of building heights, return the indices of the buildings you can see looking at the row from the right.

Technical screen

45 min

CoderPad

Reported 9 times

Open

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design a distributed cache holding billions of keys, then say what the hit rate does when a shard disappears.

Locked

BEHAVIORAL

Tell me about a disagreement you lost, and what you did once the decision went the other way.

Locked

AI ASSISTED

Build an in memory store with TTL, scan and restore using the assistant, then justify every line you kept.

Locked

PRODUCT ARCH

Design the Instagram feed end to end, starting at the client API rather than at the storage layer.

Locked

CODING

Rebuild a binary search tree from its preorder traversal, with duplicates and no balance guarantee.

Locked

BEHAVIORAL

What is the largest mistake you have made at work, and what did your team change because of it?

Locked

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design the ad auction path so that a bid is scored, priced and served inside a hundred milliseconds.

Locked

CODING

Count the subarrays whose sum is a multiple of k, then do the same thing in a single pass over the array.

Locked

39 more questions available

The exact questions Meta is asking this week, tagged by round and difficulty.

Unlock All 40 Questions

Each question stays in the bank for 14 days, so everything here was asked in the last 14 days. Candidates who see them first pass at 3.2 times the normal rate.

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The Unfair Advantage

Why this actually works

01

Real questions, not guesses

Collected from engineers who sat the loop, then cross validated against other intel sources.

02

Fresh every week

The database updates every 7 days, so you never study stale problems.

03

Covers every round

Coding, the AI assisted round, System Design or Product Architecture, and the scored behavioural.

04

120+ companies tracked

Also interviewing at Google, Amazon or OpenAI? We have their questions too.

05

Difficulty and pattern data

Tagged by difficulty, round and category, so you know where prep time goes.

06

Candidate verified only

Reported by a candidate, then cross verified against multiple data points.

3.2×

Higher pass rate

120+

Companies tracked

3.2K+

Engineers using this

FAQ

Common questions

How are the questions sourced?

Directly from engineers who interviewed at Meta, then cross validated against other intel sources into a stack ranked list.

How often are questions updated?

We add new questions every 7 days and retire each one after 14 days, so the bank turns over twice in the window it covers. The AI-enabled prompts rotate fastest.

Does Meta ask LeetCode questions?

Yes, two mediums per screen. The catch is the pad: no compiler and no test runner, so the code is graded exactly as you typed it.

Can I use AI tools in the interview?

In one round, and only if you are at E5 to E7 or M2. Since October 2025 that round hands you a model picker and scores how you check the output. Everywhere else it is banned.

What is team matching?

Meta hires to the company, not to a team. Once you pass, managers with headcount at your level pick from a pool, and the offer waits on that.

What does Meta pay an E4?

Around $310K in Menlo Park and the same in New York, because Meta pays both at the top band, or roughly £149K in London. About a third of it is stock.

How long does the process take?

Six to twelve weeks. The loop is one day, but the debrief takes a week or two and team matching can add a month on its own.

Is this just for Meta?

No. GothamLoop covers 120+ companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI and Apple.

The Meta interview cheat code nobody talks about

Five stages, and your level is not decided until the fourth

Recruiter screen

Technical screen

The full loop

Debrief and level

Team matching

Base barely moves after E5. The stock does all the work

What Meta is asking right now

Why this actually works

Real questions, not guesses

Fresh every week

Covers every round

120+ companies tracked

Difficulty and pattern data

Candidate verified only

Common questions

Pricing plan

Company Interview Guides