Meta Engineering Manager Interview Guide

A phone interview with an HR recruiter will be the first step in your interview with Meta. 

• Be concise - the recruiter is mostly just trying to understand if you've got relevant past experience, and are a good fit for the Meta values.
• Establish a good relationship - Meta recruiters are extraordinarily helpful throughout the process and can really help set you up for success.

• Talk through your past background and experience in managing engineers
• Why Meta? How does this fit into your longer career goals?
• Are you familiar with what this role will involve? Do you happen to have any relevant

The first-round interview comes after your recruiter's call. This is usually a conversation with another EM who is one level senior to the level you're interviewing for. If there's a specific team you're intervieiwng for (as opposed to the general pool) -- this will often be your hiring manager.

The call is roughly 45min long, and covers 4 themes

• People Management and Cross functional collaboration
• Technical Design and Architecture
• Career conversation & motivation
• Questions you have for your interviewer

I have 3 tips (none should be particularly surprising).

1. Efficiency: Given that you're covering a lot of ground - be concise. You don't want to let one topic hijack the whole interview. Your interviewer is trying to cover a ton of ground and assessing your "breadth of fit" across the different things Meta looks for (and that they're specifically looking for, if it's a role specific interview). These conversations often don't go too deep, but they will cover a lot of ground.
2. Demonstration: Imply depth even if you aren't able to explain it. For instance, if you're talking through a technical topic - explain the business impact or the number of people involved upfront. If you're talking about people leadership, talk about your org scope or the range of crafts you've managed. etc. As Meta's own official guide says "Hierarchical, top-down managers aren't the norm at Facebook. The most successful managers support and motivate their teams, provide career guidance and work to ensure their success. You'll want to think about how you embody these qualities and be ready to answer questions in a compelling, inspiring way that makes an interviewer think "I would love to work for or with this person.”"
3. Practice -- this is a tricky round, since one wrong signal is enough to sabotage an invitation to the next round. In the onsite loop you have a lot more time to "flesh out" your answers and explain context. In this interview you often won't have the luxury of doing this since there are so many topics your interviewer will be trying to cover.

• How do you help people manage their careers? What’s an example of a tough management situation you’ve dealt with?
• Describe a system / product / app you or your team built. How did you evaluate the design of your system? How did you test performance and scalability? Did you have to iterate on the design Looking back, what would you have done differently?
• How do you plan on choosing your next role? What is it about Meta that you think aligns it with your career goals?

Access the full list of interview questions in the Meta Engineering Manager question bank.

You will receive an invitation to complete the Onsite interview round if your initial interview goes well. As with most big-tech companies, this is the big challenge, 5-6 separate interviews during this interview cycle (often over just one day), across a rage of Meta interviewers. It's exhausting! But it's a process which lets Meta differentiate the good from the great and filter out the best to whom they intend to extend an offer. Broadly speaking, you will have 2-3 "technical rounds" and 2-3 "non-technical" rounds.

Technical rounds include

• System Design and Architecture OR Product Design: Demonstrating that you understand how to construct highly scalable systems. Product Design interviews also come with the expectation of thinking how you'd track success, which metrics would impact customer success, and considerations beyond back-end/scale (Eg. security, customer experience, etc).
• Technical Project Deepdive OR Project Retrospective: Demonstrating past technical expertise in a project you drove -- from both the execution/delivery aspects but also technical design and decisions, tradeoffs etc. that you enabled
• Coding: Nothing special to share here. Leetcode Medium level skills. Often taken by senior level engineers.
• ML specific rounds (for ML Engineering Managers) - eg. ML Knowledge / ML Breadth and Depth, and ML System Design
• Data specific rounds (for Data Engineering Managers) - eg. Data Full Stack loop, Data Modelling, ETL Batch/Streaming
• Production specific rounds (for Production Engineering Managers) - eg. Linux/Troubleshooting and Networking

Non-technical rounds include

• People Management and Cross-functional Collaboration: Demonstrating that you can manage people with the full range of expectations that comes with. Can you work with a diverse set of stakeholders in achieving progress?
• Cross-Functional Partnerships: Can you achieve win-win outcomes in dealing with cross-functional stakeholders, especially those perceived as challenging to work with. Can you establish long term partnerships which help you and your org scale its impact beyond your current scope?
• Building Management and Engineering Culture: Much more common in M2 level interviews

Worth noting that while Meta labels these interviews uniquely - they aren't actually very different to what other companies look at, for instance if you have a look at the Google Engineering Manager interview guide, you'll see the same themes cropping up there.

People Management Interview Sample Questions

• How do you drive the professional development of your team?
• Tell me your approach to managing an underperforming employee. How would you manage this challenging conversation?
• How do you recruit good engineers?
• Describe a challenging circumstance where you showed leadership.

Project Retrospective Interview Sample Questions

• Please describe the project you worked on that was the most difficult technically and why it was difficult.
• Tell me about a system, product, or project you've worked on. What technical and design issues did you encounter? How were they resolved?
• Tell me about a time you scaled a system.

XFN Interview Questions

• Tell me about the most challenging stakeholders you've worked with. What mechanisms have you developed in to keep this working relationship healthy?
• Talk about a time you failed to deliver on stakeholder expectations. What was the outcome
• How do you involve your stakeholders when developing technical strategy?
• How do you explain technical project requirements to non-technical teams?

System Design Interview Sample Questions

• Create a real-time commenting system for a Facebook post that can have millions of active users.
• What changes might you make to the Facebook newsfeed?
• How would a load balancer be used with Memcache servers?

Coding Interview Sample Questions

• Given an array num of n integers where n > 1, return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i].
• Given a list of non-negative numbers and a target integer k, write a function to check if the array has a continuous subarray of size at least two that sums up to the multiple of k, that is, sums up to n*k where n is also an integer.

As always - there's a much more robust list of questions available in the Meta Engineering Manager question bank.