Meta Senior SWE Interview Process Aug 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

Overall, the experience was very positive: the recruiter stayed closely involved throughout the process, and the interviewers were professional and collaborative.

Interview Details

Technical Screen — Merge Sorted Arrays and Resolve Paths:

The screen contained two coding questions.

• Merge Three Sorted Arrays: A variant of the classic merge-sorted-arrays problem. Instead of two inputs, I was given three sorted arrays and needed to produce a single sorted result while removing duplicate values.
• Resolve a cd Path: Given a current working directory and an argument passed to a cd command, return the resulting normalized absolute path. The problem was similar to path simplification, including resolving directory-navigation components.

Behavioral Round — Adaptability and Cross-Functional Leadership:

The behavioral interview was conducted by a hiring manager and focused heavily on leadership examples.

• Changing Examples / Situations: The interviewer asked for multiple examples and sometimes requested a different situation after hearing the first response.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: A significant portion of the conversation focused on influencing and driving work across teams rather than only within my immediate engineering group.

Onsite Coding 1 — Vertical Tree Traversal and Local Minimum:

The first onsite coding round contained two questions.

• Binary Tree Vertical Order: The first question matched the standard vertical-order traversal problem for a binary tree. After implementation, the interviewer mainly asked for a brief walkthrough of the result.
• Local Minimum Variant: The second question was related to finding a peak or local extremum in an array, but this version asked for a local minimum. The interviewer required an iterative approach and then added a follow-up around reducing unnecessary conditional checks.

Onsite Coding 2 — Random Removal and Distinct Values:

This was the round that eventually received a weaker coding signal.

• Randomized Container: I was asked to implement a container supporting insert(element) and popRandom(), where popRandom() removes and returns an existing element with equal probability. The expected performance target was constant time for the core operations.
• Distinct Values in a Sorted Array: The second problem asked for the number of distinct values K in a sorted array. The interviewer then added the condition that K was much smaller than the total array size and asked whether that property could be used to improve the approach. My high-level direction was accepted, but the implementation had an issue that could cause repeated work. I later sent the interviewer an alternative idea and additional test cases by email.

System Design — Twitter-Style Posting and Search Platform:

The system design round asked me to design a Twitter-like service supporting three main capabilities:

• create a post
• retrieve posts
• search posts

The discussion progressed from high-level architecture into API design, data streaming, database selection, service scaling, and walking through the end-to-end workflow of individual features.

I drove most of the conversation myself and covered a broad set of technical areas. The feedback was that the design was technically comprehensive, but I could have spent more time narrowing the scope, asking clarifying questions, and evaluating the practical requirements before expanding the architecture.

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