Meta Frontend Engineer Interview Guide

This guide uses the internal Meta FEE interview docs (which we have thanks to our coaches) as a spine and adds specific tips gathered from our coach network to help you crack this interview.

The interview loop officially goes through these stages:

1. Recruiter screen
2. Initial technical screen
3. Full loop, 4 to 6 interviews:
   2 x Coding
   UIE Architecture and Design
   Behavioral
4. Hiring committee and team match

Meta hires engineers in two loops:

• Software Engineer, Front End track
• Software Engineer, Product: for engineers with front-end backgrounds where a LeetCode-style coding and a product architecture round replace the UIE architecture and Design round. 

This guide covers the front-end track. For insights into related roles, have a look at our Meta Software Engineer and Amazon Front-End Engineer guides.

This is a 30 minute call on which you'll talk to your recruiter about your

• background
• experience
• long-term goals, 
• why Meta 

and other relevant details so they can lock in a level that sets the bar for how you’ll be evaluated for the rest of the loop.

They'll also ask you about your areas of expertise and a few questions on how you've addressed technical challenges in some of your previous projects. They can even ask you a few short JavaScript and data structure questions like:

• What is the difference between call and apply in JavaScript?
• What data structure is the DOM based on?
• How would you implement a stack and a queue in JavaScript?

For the call to go smoothly, you should:

• Revise your JavaScript fundamentals such as this and event delegation 
• Establish a good rapport with your recruiter by being upfront about your background and what you want out of your career. They’re known to advocate for a candidate later in the process so they're good people to have on your side. 
• Deflect any comp questions because your final level will be decided by the Hiring Committee at the end of your loop and comp corresponds directly to that. 

This is a 45 minute video screen that focuses heavily on practical, core JavaScript and browser fundamentals. You’ll face 2 coding problems in increasing order of difficulty (typically easy-medium -> medium) and you’ll be expected to solve them in 35-40 minutes because the remaining time is reserved for your questions. 

The round is conducted on CoderPad and code execution is switched off so you’re expected to manually verify what you’ve written.

Interviewers will be evaluating under the same dimensions as the onsite coding round because this one is a pocket-sized version of it. Going by more recent reports, the topics that come up in this round are:

• JavaScript: iteration, closures, scope, asynchronous code, and the relative performance of object and array operations
• Data structures common in UI work: arrays, maps, sets and DOM trees
• Big O and tree traversal underneath both

Expect questions like: 

• Implement debounce, with throttle as the follow-up
• Implement an event emitter with on, off, once and emit
• Given 2 identical DOM trees and a node in the first tree, find the corresponding node in the second tree

You HAVE to practice solving problems in a plain editor because not having a compiler or autocomplete is a bit of a shock and you shouldn't experience it for the first time in the interview. 

Once you clear the screen, 4-6 onsite rounds will be scheduled. These rounds will cover

• Coding
• UIE Architecture and Design
• Behavioral

Each interview leaves a few minutes at the end for your questions. At E4 and E5, candidates describe facing 2 coding rounds, 1 UIE and 1 behavioral. At E6, candidates say that they were scheduled for an extra design round, sometimes replacing the second coding round. 

Going by candidate reports and input from our coaches, the coding rounds play a big part in the hire/no-hire decisions and the design rounds suggest the level you’ll be calibrated at. It’s super important that you score well in Behavioral, too. It’s a read on your culture fit and having all the technical stuff right but being considered a “poor fit” is not the best. 

1. Coding

This is a live coding interview on CoderPad. Each session requires you to solve 2 problems (one medium, one hard or 2 fast-paced medium) under strict time management. 

Once again, you’ll be coding in a plain editor and the interviewer won’t compile your code. A minor mistake here or there is not a problem. Meta focuses heavily on core JavaScript fundamentals, DOM manipulation, asynchronous programming and algorithmic efficiency but won’t ask you any DP questions. 

Usually, one coding round tackles utilities and small algos and the second one handles JavaScript and DOM.

Your interviewer is mainly concerned with the value you will add if you were to be hired, especially with how you handle problems you’re not familiar with. Specifically speaking, they’ll assess 4 focus areas:

• Problem Solving: the quality of your reasoning behind a solution, developing and comparing more than one and choosing the appropriate data structures and algos and speaking to space and time complexity on the way to optimizing.
• Coding: Assesses if you can convert solutions into executable code and if the code is organized and captures the right logical structure.
• Verification: this is a check on if you're considering a reasonable number of test cases or coming up with a good argument for why your code is correct. This aspect is pretty important because you’re expected to manually trace edge cases and you don’t have the luxury of a compiler or autocomplete. The official Meta guide that we mentioned earlier states very clearly that catching a bug is good news (and even uses an exclamation point). 
• Communication: This is a fairly direct assessment of if you're asking the right questions about reqs and keeping the interviewer in the loop about your approach  

Expect questions like:

• How would you create a function to convert a nested list of integers into a flat list? Can you use async/await to make an asynchronous version of this function?
• You are given a function that works but is slow. Rewrite it to make it run faster and point out what the original version was doing wrong.
• In a recursive menu, how do you make the active item stand out?

The coding rounds are vanilla JS and candidates don’t report any React. Anything you would normally import has to be hand-written, under little time so it’s super important to spend some time practising the DOM APIs React keeps from you.  If you reach for Lodash out of habit, reimplement the few you use the most and then run them against a large input to see what your version costs in memory. 

2. UIE architecture and Design

This is a design round with no coding involved. It’s a test of your ability to design scalable, high-performance user interfaces that are maintainable, especially at Meta’s scale.

You’ll be given a high-level prompt and a whiteboard (Excalidraw if virtual) and you have to drive the conversation from there. Unlike a standard system design, you’ll be asked to focus on client-side constraints, state management, component lifecycles and data flow. 

Generally speaking, you have to get the basics right. Ask clarifying questions and sort your reqs into functional and non-functional. Then, outline the data models and design clean client-server API contracts optimized for minimal data transfer and fast rendering. Spend roughly 15 minutes on high-level architecture and another 15 on deepdives and bottlenecks.

The interviewer is trying to understand if you can architect a solution by connecting multiple concepts and be prudent while doing so.  

Interviewers are officially grading 4 focus areas:

• Problem navigation: A read on if you can understand the problem space and the constraints that come with it. It also scores the quality of the questions you ask to zero in on the reqs. 
• Solution Design: How you keep the big-picture in mind while designing a working solution to a complete problem (or even parts of it)
• Technical excellence: covers how deep your technical expertise is, especially when it comes to naming dependencies and tradeoffs. Risk mitigation is also a big part of the score here.
• Technical communication: Being able to articulate your vision and reasoning clearly, especially when the interviewer interjects or opposes your methods. 

Expect questions like:

• Design the front end for a messaging system
• Design the front end for a news feed
• Design a photo album
• Design a Pinterest-style masonry feed

3. Behavioral

In this session, the interviewer will want to learn about your background and what you're passionate about in tech. Expect 4-5 questions with follow-ups for each. They'll try to assess if you thrive in Meta’s fast-paced and highly unstructured environment, and that'll be assessed by gauging 5 signals.

• Resolving conflict: how you view/manage disagreements with colleagues and if you can empathize with the people whose points differ from yours radically.
• Growing Continuously: actively seeking out and valuing chances to grow and learn professionally 
• Embracing ambiguity: showing resourcefulness and a bias for action even when the path/project is not defined clearly
• Driving Results: Pushing yourself and others to deliver against your shared goals
• Communicating Effectively: Being able to keep all stakeholders in the loop by tailoring your communication based on the work and audience

Expect questions like:

• Have you ever hurt a working relationship because of a conflict? Did it recover?
• How did you react when a project’s priority shifted unexpectedly?
• Have you ever taken the lead on a project and then realized you had incomplete data?
• How do you keep your xfn partners (DSs, PMs, etc) accountable for all their deliverables when you’re working on a project?

When you sit down to build a story bank, we recommend that you take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning) to structure your stories. The X-Factor at the end - Learning - is your definitive chance to demonstrate intellectual humility, and helps you reflect on a personal takeaway on how that situation changed you for the better. 

Make sure you first read Meta’s work culture memo so you know how to frame your stories and Learning. 

At the end of each round, interviewers get 24 hours to submit their notes and pick between Strong Hire, Hire, Leaning No Hire, or No Hire for you. 

The Hiring Committee, consisting of senior FEEs then reviews that feedback to make the final call and decide your level. 

If the committee signs off on a “yes”, you’ll then move into the Team Matching phase where you'll do 30-minute informal chats with HMs until you zero in on a fit.

E3: $187K

E4: $265K

E5: $424K

View the latest compensation for Meta FEEs on Levels.fyi