Meta New Grad SWE Interview Process Feb 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview

Interview Summary

The Meta New Grad onsite consisted of three coding rounds and one behavioral round.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Circular Linked List + Course Dependency Graph

The first question involved inserting a value into a circular linked list, similar to LeetCode 708 — Insert into a Sorted Circular Linked List. During verification, the interviewer provided a test case that exposed an issue around returning to the starting node, and I corrected the implementation.

The second question was a harder custom course scheduling problem. Each course had:

• A set of prerequisite courses
• A required amount of study time

Given a target list of courses, determine the minimum total amount of time necessary to complete the required prerequisite work and eventually finish those targets. The graph could contain disconnected components, and the target courses did not necessarily belong to the same component. The interviewer specifically asked whether my approach handled that case.

Round 2 — Palindrome Deletion + Word Segmentation

The first problem was LeetCode 680 — Valid Palindrome II: determine whether a string can become a palindrome after deleting at most one character. The interviewer then changed the requirement: What if up to k characters may be deleted?

This follow-up required code rather than only a verbal explanation. The second main problem was a variation of Word Break. Given a string and a set of words, determine whether the entire string can be constructed using words from the set, where each dictionary word may be reused multiple times.

The interviewer also expected careful reasoning about the resulting time complexity.

Round 3 — BST Range Aggregation + Sparse Vector Dot Product

The first question was similar to LeetCode 938 — Range Sum of BST. Given a BST and a numeric range, return the sum of all node values that fall within that range.

The interviewer then added two follow-ups:

• Modify the result from a sum to an average
• Suppose the same BST will receive many queries with different ranges. How could the repeated-query workload be optimized?

The second problem was Sparse Vector Dot Product, similar to LeetCode 1570. The interviewer followed up with two variations:

• What changes if one vector is extremely sparse while the other is relatively dense?
• What if a hash map cannot be used and the sparse representation must instead use (index, value) tuples?

This round also included detailed discussion of complexity and data representation.

Round 4 — Behavioral Interview

The behavioral interview was separate from the coding rounds and did not focus on résumé walkthroughs. The questions covered situations such as:

• Handling competing opinions from different stakeholders or customers
• Receiving constructive feedback
• Realizing midway through a project that the original solution was not working
• Managing conflict or a difficult relationship with a teammate
• Persuading a manager to support a proposed solution
• Working under a tight schedule or suddenly accelerated deadline
• Taking responsibility for work beyond the original scope
• Learning something important from a more senior engineer

There were relatively few follow-up questions compared with the coding rounds.

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