Meta E6 interview experience - first ever MAANG interview

Hi all, I was interviewed for Meta E6. My long preparation comes to and end. Interview call: I was head hunted by Meta recruiter at the end of last year and I had initial call wither her and she scheduled a phone screen. Phone screen: Interviewer was nice and friendly, It was mainly for them to know about myself and my experience and highest level I worked for. Phone screen coding: He asked my leet code medium question, solved it optimally. Recruiter called emailed after few weeks to inform me that they are happy to proceed to next level. Virtual onsite is scheduled with 5 interviews. They gave me 5 weeks prep time. 1. Coding round1: Question1: Question about string manipulation, typical leet code medium Question2: Question again leet code medium, solve it optimally in the first instance Status: Hire - (I didn't address one use case initially for question1 but when interviewer asked me how to solve it I have explained him how we can do that) 2. Coding round 2: Question1: Typical palindrome question, solve it optimally in the first instance Question2: Not a leet code question, I was able to solve it but not optimally interviewer gave me few hints but was not able to solve optimally Status: TBC 3. Product design 1: A general publishers and consumers with search functionality kind of question Asked some questions related to functionality, I basically considered by my self as consumer and my self as producer and though of their point of view. I was able to talk it through from publishers point of view, and explained how different events can flow through the system, I was also able to talk about security, reliability, scalability, latency, availability etc. I was also able cover consumer side of the application. There was questions from interviewer about scalability and monitoring and ability to debug etc I was able to answer all questions. At the interviewer said, "This is solid", he sound satisfied with the answers Status: TBC 4. Product design 2: A general application with huge data to search Asked questions about the functionality of the system, for example what exactly users want to see when they search? should make the search results consutomisable per user? should have unlimited scrolling or pages? Before directly going to the search functionality I explained how the actual data can ingested and how that can be used to for indexing. Then I took example of two users one producing the data in one region and a user doing a search in another region. Explained how the data can be replicated and make it available in other regions. Explained why we need meta data tables and also explained why we need key values stores etc. Addressed some secondary requirements to do with customisable search, addressed issues to do with ordering etc. Basically I was going through the system thinking my self as consumer thinking how we can make the search faster and easier and relevant. Interviewer asked me a question, What kind of metrics would you take out of the system, I said we need some kind of metrics around, how frequently users are using the search, metrics around whether the search results are accurate enough? other metrics around scalability etc. I missed to say metrics around latency but interviewer asked me what other metrics do you collect I said, we need to collect different metrics around latency between different components/systems we are using for the search, it sounded like he satisfied with that answer. Status: TBC 5. Behavioural: Since E6 is like tech lead kind of position I knew they will look for leadership qualities so I prepared setup of real stories in hand to talk about. Questions: There are questions in facebook recruiting website, in the preparation section, mostly those ones. Status: Hire Comment: answers are not concise (I knew I was elaborating more than I should but I knew they are more good signals I can give more in the elaboration and was not sure he got all the signals I wanted give him) Waiting to hear from recruiter, the system design happened two weeks ago but coding one had to posted which I had it yesterday. Currently a contractor: £750PD YOE: 11 Since this post too long already, will write another post about how I prepared and lesson learnt on the way. EDIT1: Just heard from recruiter that they want to do a follow up on the coding. She said they didn’t get enough signals for them assess. She also talked about levelling down from E6 to E5. Although from behavioural interview they had good signals for E6 but not many from product designs. Do they look for E6 signals in coding as well?, can the follow up interview influence the decision of levelling, I don’t think so just checking my chances for E6. #engineering #software #swe #meta