Meta Staff Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Tell me about the last feature you shipped with an aggressive timeline. Walk me through your approach and what you learned from user feedback afterward.

2.Tell me about a time you shipped a solution knowing it wasn't perfect but users needed it quickly. How did you handle the technical debt afterward?

3.Describe a technical decision you championed that your team or leadership initially pushed back on. How did you convince them and what was the outcome?

4.Tell me about a time you had to give critical feedback to a peer or someone senior to you. What was the situation and how did you approach it?

5.Walk me through how you decide what to work on when you have multiple high-priority projects competing for your time.

6.Describe a product or feature you built where you had to consider its broader social impact. How did that influence your technical decisions?

7.You're optimizing a React component that renders news feed posts and it's causing janky scrolling on older Android devices. The component re-renders frequently due to like count updates. How would you approach this?

8.Write a function that takes a user's social graph connections and returns friend suggestions ranked by mutual connections, but exclude anyone they've already rejected as a suggestion.

9.Our TAO social graph store is experiencing hotspot issues where certain celebrity profiles are getting 10x more read traffic than our sharding can handle. Walk me through your solution.

10.You need to implement a feature that lets users search their Instagram message history across all conversations. The messages are stored across multiple sharded databases. How do you design this?

11.We're seeing 30-second delays in our ML model inference pipeline that serves Instagram Reels recommendations. The model calls are blocking the main thread. How would you redesign this system?

12.You're tasked with building a system that detects when WhatsApp group admins are adding bots or fake accounts to large groups. Design an approach that can scale to billions of group membership changes daily.

13.Design a real-time commenting system for Facebook Live videos that can handle 500,000 concurrent viewers on a single stream. Comments need to appear instantly for all viewers.

14.You're building the feature that syncs a user's Instagram Story views across all their devices in real-time. Design this system knowing users switch between mobile, web, and multiple apps frequently.

15.Design the system that powers WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption key exchange for group chats. Focus on how you'd handle a group growing from 10 to 256 members dynamically.

16.Build a system that automatically detects and removes duplicate posts across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads when users cross-post the same content. Consider both exact matches and near-duplicates.

17.Design Meta Quest's social presence system that shows friends what VR experiences others are currently in, with rich activity details. Handle the case where someone has friends across Quest, Facebook, and Instagram.

18.Design the recommendation engine that powers Instagram Reels, but specifically focus on the cold start problem for new users who have no viewing history. You need to serve relevant content within their first 10 swipes.

19.Tell me about a time you had to get buy-in from multiple engineering teams to adopt a shared technical standard or practice across the organization.

20.Describe a situation where you had to make a technical decision quickly with incomplete information, and how you got the team aligned behind that decision.

21.Walk me through a time when you had to rebuild trust with a team after a major technical failure or missed deadline that you were responsible for.

22.Tell me about a time you identified that your team was working on something that wasn't the highest impact, and how you redirected them toward more meaningful work.

23.Describe a situation where you had to convince a skeptical VP or director to invest in a long-term technical initiative that wouldn't show immediate results.

24.Tell me about a time you had to navigate a situation where your team's solution conflicted with another team's roadmap, and both teams had valid technical approaches.

25.Instagram Reels has 200 billion plays per month globally. If we wanted to add a 'Save to Watch Later' feature, estimate how much additional storage we'd need in the first year.

26.WhatsApp message delivery suddenly drops from 99.9% to 97% globally with no code changes. Walk me through how you'd investigate and what you'd check first.

27.Facebook's news feed ranking algorithm needs to balance showing friends' posts versus pages and ads. How would you design an experiment to test whether increasing friend content by 20% impacts user engagement?

28.Meta Quest's multiplayer VR experiences are seeing 15-second lag spikes during peak hours. The issue appears when more than 50 users join the same virtual space. How would you approach this systematically?

29.Threads is planning to launch in a new country but needs to estimate server capacity. The country has 50 million social media users and we expect 10% adoption in year one. Walk me through your capacity planning approach.

30.Instagram's algorithm team wants to test a new feature that shows posts from 'friends of friends' in the feed. Estimate the computational cost and propose how to validate this won't overwhelm our recommendation systems.