Meta Software Engineer Interview Guide

This guide is not speculative, crowdsourced, or even mildly unsure.

It is informed directly by Prepfully coaches who are Senior EMs, Staff Engineers and even one Senior Staff Engineer at Meta right now. They sit on hiring committees, sharing verbatim how candidates are evaluated and that is paired with insight from candidates who recently cleared the interviews, living the experience end-to-end.

This guide is written by people who hire and people who just got hired, to make it easier for you to take your place amongst them.

For insights into similar roles, review the guides for Meta Frontend Engineer.

Interview prep:

Meta Software Engineer Initial Interview Guide

Meta Software Engineer Coding Interview Guide

Meta System Design and Product Architectural Design Interview Guide

Meta SWE Interview Question bank with answer reviewing tool

Meta SWE Mock Interview Coaches

Role specific prep:

Meta Senior vs Staff Engineer Interview Expectations

Understanding the AI assisted coding round

Engineering at Meta

Meta Code videos

Meta Opensource website

Engineering Leadership at Meta blog

Coding Resources:

Meta’s Software engineering interview Q&A

Cracking the Meta Coding Interview Videos: The Approach and Problem Walkthrough (password:FB_IPS)

Topcoder

Design interview resources:

System and Product design overview

GitHub Design Primer

Familiarise yourself with Excalidraw

This is the first round of the interview process and it usually takes the form of an informal phone or video call with a Meta recruiter. Nothing technical happens here, but the conversation still matters, because this is where Meta builds an early picture of your background, motivation, and trajectory.

You can expect questions like:

• Walk me through your background and the work you have been doing recently.
• What interested you in this role, and what about Meta feels like a good next step for you?
• What kinds of problems or projects have you enjoyed working on the most, and why?
• Tell me about a project that challenged you in a meaningful way and how you approached it.
• What are you hoping to grow into over the next few years, and what kind of team or work environment helps you do your best work?

This is also the stage where the recruiter may mention Meta’s accommodations process more broadly, just to make it clear that support is available if you need it. The goal is for every candidate to be able to play to their strengths on equal footing once the technical rounds begin.

Also, take a moment to communicate to your recruiter how serious you are about this role. Once a Meta recruiter decides you might be a strong fit, they really show up for you. They are surprisingly generous with context, timelines, and guidance in a way that makes the process feel far less opaque than people expect.

This round is a 45-minute technical interview conducted over Zoom using a shared editor (currently CoderPad), and it is designed to assess your core coding fundamentals before moving you into the full loop.

Our coaches inside Meta hiring for this role have told us that you will be evaluated on exactly these parameters: problem solving, coding, verification and communication

Code is not executed, minor syntax issues are fine and Prepfully candidates who recently cracked this interview mentioned that Meta treats finding and fixing your own bugs as a positive signal.

What happens in this round:

• Short introductions and light context setting
• 35 minutes focussed on one or two coding problems on algorithms and data structures (almost always typically medium LC level)
• Coding in a plain text environment without execution, autocomplete, or debugging tools
• An expectation of you to have an ongoing discussion on requirements, solution options, and trade offs
• A few minutes at the end for your questions (one of the easiest moments to leave a memorable impression)

Interview questions in this round:

• Write a code to check whether a given string is a palindrome or not
• Given an integer array, return an array such that the value in the array is the product of all values of the original array except the number in that position in the original array.
• Print a binary tree in a zigzag order.
• Write a code to find all nodes in a binary tree at a distance of N from the leaf nodes.
• Given the root of a binary tree, determine the number of root-to-leaf paths such that the sum of the values of the nodes is N.
• Determine whether a given string matches a pattern that may include wildcard characters (wildcard pattern matching problems have shown up a couple of times for a few candidates)

You can code in the language you know best. DON'T write in pseudocode. If your performance sits too close to the cutoff, Meta may add one more technical interview to round out the decision.

The interviewer is not invested in your growth, they are there to score what shows up in that hour. You can learn from a mistake with a coach; you can’t argue with an interview score, so pick where you mess up.

See the difference a Meta SWE Mock Interview Coach can make

Meta turns the dial up from the initial screen by expecting more depth, structure, and consistency in how you think and code. The interview runs for 45 minutes, with most of the time spent solving one or two coding problems and the rest reserved for discussion.

Prepfully’s Mock Interview Coaches in Meta tell us that in this round, the evaluation criteria are problem solving reasoning, code organization, verification logic and communication skills as fundamental evaluation.

Interviewers can only assess what you show during the interview, which is why talking through your thought process, trade offs, and decisions out loud is expected rather than optional. Prepfully’s candidates who recently interviewed said the round worked in their favour when they treated it like a working session rather than a silent test.

You can hope the pressure does not get to you, or you can meet it early.

Over 2873 candidates chose to rehearse this exact round and they would strongly suggest you do not walk in blind.

Prepare with a Prepfully Meta SWE mock interview coach for the real feel.

What happens in this round

• Brief introductions and context setting
• One or two coding problems with more depth than the phone screen
• Coding in a plain text environment without execution, autocomplete, or debugging tools
• Ongoing discussion of requirements, assumptions, and trade offs
• Explicit attention to code structure, space and time complexity, and verification
• Occasional light tie-ins to your past experience or how you’ve solved similar problems in real systems

Interview questions:

• Find the length of the longest subarray that contains at most k distinct elements
• Detect whether a cycle exists in a graph and return the cycle if one is found
• Design a data structure that supports streaming integers and can return the median at any time
• Determine the length of the longest substring without repeating characters
• Find the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree

In October 2025, Meta began piloting an AI-enabled coding interview that replaces one of the two coding rounds at the onsite stage. It’s 60 minutes in a specialized CoderPad environment with an AI assistant built in. It’s highly likely that this round will be rolled out for all back-end and ops-focused roles in 2026.

This is what the average experience looks like:

If you’d like to know more about this round, head to the AI Assisted Coding Round deep dive

This round is a 45-minute design interview and, depending on the role, it will focus either on System Design or Product Architecture, a distinction Meta calls out explicitly. System Design interviews lean toward distributed systems, scalability, performance, and efficiency, while Product Architecture interviews focus more on API design, client-server interactions, usability, and how products evolve over time, but in both cases the goal is the same: to see how you solve a non-trivial, open-ended engineering problem.

Here, you will be judged upon four core criteria: Problem navigation, solution design, technical excellence, technical communication.

Here’s exactly how this round unfolds in the Meta Software Engineer interview:

• A brief introduction and framing of the session, including whether the interview will focus on System Design or Product Architectural Design
• A high-level, non-trivial design problem with intentionally incomplete information, where you are expected to drive the conversation rather than wait for instructions
• Early problem navigation, including organizing the problem space, asking clarifying questions, identifying constraints, and defining a clear set of requirements to design against
• Discussion and construction of a working solution, either at the system level or product level, with an emphasis on connecting multiple concepts into a coherent design
• Ongoing evaluation of solution design, including how well your approach addresses the full scope of the problem rather than isolated components
• Deeper technical dives when appropriate, to demonstrate technical excellence, including dependencies, trade offs, and risk mitigation
• Explicit reasoning through Meta’s core technical dimensions: scalability, availability, extensibility, security, testability, usability, portability, and operational characteristics
• Clear and structured technical communication, with interviewers paying close attention to how well you articulate your ideas, respond to feedback, and adjust your design as new considerations emerge
• Use of diagrams to make ideas concrete and collaborative using Excalidraw
• Consideration of failure modes, bottlenecks, and how the system or product would be diagnosed or debugged in real operation
• Time at the end for your questions, often opening space for discussion about how similar systems are built and evolved inside Meta

Here are some recently asked Meta SWE System Design Interview Questions. To see where you stand, you can also input your answers into the free answer reviewing tool and evaluate your answer against Meta's rubrics.

• Design a system for managing secrets in a distributed environment
• Devise a behavioral analytics system for fraud prevention at Meta
• Build a data lake management system for distributed infrastructures

See the most recent System Design questions in the Meta SWE interview, reported by recent candidates for free.

For new grad or junior Software Engineer roles at Meta, system design is usually not its own standalone round. The interview loop leans much more heavily toward coding, data structures, and algorithms.

That said, you are not completely off the hook. You might still see lighter, more foundational system design or product design style questions that check whether you understand APIs, basic data modeling, and how client server systems work together.

The Behavioral Interview is a 45-minute interview in Meta’s onsite loop and it is a structured evaluation, not a free-flowing chat, even though it may feel more conversational on the surface.

Prepfully experts who work inside Meta (and sit on hiring committees) have been refreshingly direct about this round. There is a clear scorecard, and the evaluation criteria come down to these categories: resolving conflict, growing continuously, embracing ambiguity, driving results, and communicating effectively.

Interviewers will ask you to anchor your answers in specific past experiences, so guide the conversation deliberately.

We recommend moving beyond STAR now (which has been the popular framework for these interviews for the last decade or so); and instead move to use CAR (Context, Action, Result) for two reasons
(a) it's more concise, and time is precious when you're trying to demonstrate your years of awesomeness in 45min
(b) it's what Meta's started using internally to assess interviews (yep, you heard it on Prepfully first).

Vague, abstract, or hypothetical answers are usually redirected, so every story should be concrete, scoped, and outcome driven, especially now that you understand exactly how those stories are evaluated.

What happens in the Behavioral Round and what your interviewer is gathering about you:

• Questions about specific projects, challenges, or decisions you were directly responsible for. They are often centered on a challenge where you were responsible for both the approach and the outcome. You will be asked to explain how you thought through the problem, what options you considered, and why you went the way you did. Influence matters too, especially how your thinking changed the direction of the work or helped others align.
• Follow ups that dig into your problem solving reasoning, where interviewers want to know why you picked that approach, what constraints shaped it, and whether you considered alternatives before locking in a solution
• Examples that show how you embraced ambiguity, like moving forward when requirements were incomplete, priorities were still settling, or the problem itself was not fully understood yet, and how you reduced uncertainty through iteration rather than waiting for perfect information
• Exploration of conflict and disagreement, where interviewers look at how you worked through differences with teammates or partners, how you listened to other perspectives, and how you reached alignment
• Clear articulation of how you drove results, focusing on what changed because of your work, how success was defined upfront or refined along the way, and how you knew the solution was doing what it was supposed to do once it was in use
• Reflection that shows growing continuously, where feedback from peers or downstream teams forced a rethink, and you can clearly explain what you do differently today because of it, not just what you learned in theory

Interview questions:

• Tell me about a time you had to adapt to a significant change or a new process.
• Elaborate on a decision you made that was unpopular at the time but you still stand by.
• Describe a project where the technical solution was sound but the outcome still fell short. What did you learn from that?
• Tell me about a time you identified a risk that others did not see at first. What happened?
• Tell me about a project where your role evolved significantly over time. How did you adapt?
• Describe a time you had to make a call that had real consequences and limited opportunity to reverse it.

Offers at Meta are level driven and heavily weighted toward equity, so the most important negotiation work happens earlier, when your impact and trajectory are being calibrated.

When compensation comes up, Meta expects a calm, well-informed conversation, where you advocate for yourself thoughtfully and with context. For role, level, and location-specific details, head to Levels.fyi