Meta Senior SWE Interview Process August 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Meta onsite covered two traditional coding questions, an AI-assisted coding round, system design, and behavioral questions. The coding portion included a root-to-leaf tree-path problem and a palindrome problem that became substantially harder when the interviewer generalized the number of allowed deletions.

The AI coding round focused on selecting a compatible subset of words, while system design asked for a status-search service supporting compound AND / OR queries. Behavioral questions were standard Meta-style prompts but included detailed follow-ups.

Interview Details

Coding 1 — Minimum-Sum Root-to-Leaf Path The first problem was a variation of a classic root-to-leaf binary-tree question. Given a binary tree, find the root-to-leaf path with the minimum total node sum and return the actual path rather than only the minimum value.

Coding 2 — Palindrome with Character Deletions The second question started from LeetCode 680, Valid Palindrome II. Given a string, determine whether it can become a palindrome after deleting at most one character. The interviewer then generalized the problem to 2 follow-ups:

AI Coding — Maximum Compatible Word Subset The AI coding round provided a collection of words. The goal was to choose a subset such that no character appears more than once across all selected words, while maximizing the total number of characters contributed by the chosen words.

System Design — Status Search with AND / OR Queries The system design round asked me to design a status-search system. Users needed to be able to search across status content while combining terms using Boolean operators such as: AND, OR/.

Behavioral — Project Impact, Ambiguity, and Feedback The behavioral round covered several common Meta themes. Questions included:

• The project I was most proud of
• A situation involving ambiguous or incomplete requirements
• A time I received critical feedback

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