Software Engineering Manager
Initial Loop
Interview Guide
Welcome to your preparation guide for your interview at Meta! Use the table of contents below
to quickly jump to the section you are looking for. Whether you’re taking your initial screen or
your full loop interview, our engineering leaders and recruiters put together this guide so you
know what to expect and how to prepare. We recognize that interviewing can be stressful, so
we hope this guide provides the information and resources you need. Remember, your
recruiter is there to support you, so please reach out to them with any questions.
What you’ll find in this guide
Accommodations process..................................................................................................................1
Interview process overview...............................................................................................................2
People Management and Behavioral interview............................................................................. 3
System or Product Design interview...............................................................................................3
What can you expect?.........................................................................................................................3
Final tips for your interview.............................................................................................................. 5
Post interview – What to expect...................................................................................................... 5
Appendix / Resources.........................................................................................................................5
Accommodations process
Meta is committed to providing reasonable support (called accommodations) in our recruiting processes for
qualified candidates with disabilities, physical conditions, mental health conditions, neurodivergence, sincerely
held religious beliefs, pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, as required by law. If you need
assistance or require an accommodation, reach out via the Accommodations request form.
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Interview process overview
This guide will explain what to expect during your interviews with Meta. As part of your interview, you will have
the opportunity to meet with peers, cross-functional partners, and other leaders at Meta. Your recruiter will be
your guide throughout the process and aim to adequately prepare you to bring your best self to your interview.
What will your interview process be?
Your interview process will include two separate 45-minute interviews; each interview will leave a few minutes at
the end for your questions. You can expect the following interviews in the initial round:
• People management and behavioral
• System or product
The most successful managers support and motivate their teams, provide career guidance, and work to ensure
their success. You’ll want to think about how you embody these qualities and be ready to answer questions in a
compelling and inspiring way.
Video Conference interview best practices
• Make sure you're in a quiet environment.
• Double check that you have a reliable internet/phone connection.
• It's okay to ask the person you're speaking with to speak slowly if you can't catch what they're saying.
• You'll need a laptop with a webcam, speaker, and mic. We recommend using a headset or headphones
with a mic for better quality audio, but this is optional.
• While we embrace the usage of advanced tooling in our day-to-day work to build the future of social
connection, we ask that you not use any unauthorized outside assistance during interviews. Throughout
the interview process you may be asked to share your screen via Zoom. Here you can find guidance on
how this works. Additionally, we ask that you disable and not use filters during your interview. This will
help us get an understanding of how you approach problem-solving and coding independently. Outside
assistance includes, but is not limited to, consulting external resources, seeing help from others, or using
AI tools, like ChatGPT.
Interview Dress Code
As you’re probably aware, we promote a casual environment at Meta so that everyone can be their authentic
selves. Formal dress is not required (jeans are definitely ok!). Dress comfortably. We care about what you can do,
not what you wear.
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People Management and Behavioral interview
What can you expect?
This part of your discussion will focus on situational questions. For example, your interviewer will ask questions
like, “Can you provide an example of…?” or “Tell me about a time that…?”
What do we look for?
One important piece of advice for your interviews: it’s ok if you don’t know! No one who works at Meta is an
expert in all things, and we don’t look for perfection in the people we interview. If you aren’t sure of something
during your interview, you’re encouraged to ask clarifying questions and be upfront if there are topics that you
have less experience with. Your interviewer will be thinking about how your skills and experience might help Meta
as well as how you tackle problems you’re not as familiar with.
How to prep
During this interview, the interviewer is going to ask you about situations that may come up when managing
people or leading an organization and doing the day-to-day job. To prepare, be sure to take the time to think of
specific situations that you've handled as a people manager or leader so you have those prepared before the
interview. Our interviewers will be looking for specific examples about how you have concretely handled
supporting, coaching and holding people accountable in your daily job.
System or Product Design interview
What can you expect?
The 45-minute design interview will focus on the design of complex systems or products. Your interviewer will be
looking to determine if you can architect a solution to a higher-level problem that requires connecting multiple
complex system or product architecture concepts. The question will be posed at a high level and your interviewer
will look to you to drive the design and the overall solutioning conversation.
For this interview, there often are many right ways to solve the problem. The interviewer will observe how you
design a well-structured system or product. We’ll look to you as the expert here and ask you to drive the design,
starting with defining the high-level goals and then proposing a solution. In this interview, your interviewer will
assess your performance on four focus areas:
• Problem Navigation: Are you demonstrating your ability to organize the problem space, the constraints, and the
potential solutions? You should be asking questions to reduce ambiguity, identify the most critical problems,
understand what is needed for quantitative analysis, and define a requirement set to design to.
• Solution Design: We are evaluating your ability to design a working solution that addresses either the complete
problem/design or pieces of the problem/design. Are you able to consider the big picture in your design?
• Technical Excellence: Can you dive into the technical details when needed? Can you identify and articulate the
dependencies and trade-offs? How are you mitigating potential risks and failure points?
• Communication: Can you articulate your vision and technical ideas clearly? We are assessing your ability to
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communicate your reasoning as well as understand and address feedback from the interviewer.
How to prep
Interviewers can only assess your skills and abilities based on what you show them during your interview, so it’s
important to plan and prepare to best showcase your strengths. As you begin preparing, please reference your
Career Profile for additional role-specific prep materials, if available
● Refresh on CS fundamentals (operating systems, networking, distributed systems) and focus on those
you've worked in.
● Recall previous designs as they are a good starting point for you to think about how you'd answer a
design question.
● Research how the hyper-scale companies have built their systems (Google File System, Facebook TAO
cache, Amazon S3) and build a list of basic concepts used as it is a good place to refresh on CS.
● Practice using online system design questions and try to answer them on paper in roughly 30 minutes
per question. For products, think about a product or service that you use and talk through your thought
process as you design that product in 30 minutes.
● Review the basics of hardware (cost, performance, limits) across CPU, network and storage to give you a
physical sense of what systems are currently capable of.
● Think through tradeoffs as we're much more interested in seeing how you think through basic tradeoffs
compared to only focusing on optimal solutions. For example, easy-to-build APIs vs. long-term APIs, UI
complexity vs. server complexity, performance vs. scalability, latency vs. throughput.
During the interview
We may focus on specific types of systems (ads, distributed learning systems) or we may be more product
focused. We won’t expect you to know algorithms that you likely wouldn’t know off the top of your head (i.e. quad
trees or Paxos). Demonstrate an understanding of the low-level restraints and how they affect the high-level
goals. Be sure to talk through your solutions while keeping in mind different tradeoffs. Some areas to discuss:
● Testability: formally, or otherwise, gaining confidence that the components are correct.
● Usability: customer’s experience with the system or product and how to evolve it quickly.
● Extensibility: changing the software system over time.
● Security: can the system or product survive DDOS, spoofing, tampering, repudiation, etc.
● Portability: execution in different environments.
● Availability: how the system survives failures.
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● Scalability: how the system can grow over time.
● Operational characteristics: diagnosing or debugging problems when they occur.
Example systems design questions:
● Design a key value store
● Design Google Search
● Architect a worldwide video distribution system
Example product architecture or design questions:
● Tell me how you’d design a client-server API to build a rich document editor
● Design a chat service or a feed API
● Design an email server
Final tips for your interview
• Be yourself. This means being open and honest about your successes and ways you’ve improved
throughout your career. Also, be sure to call out how you have specifically added value to your team or
projects you’ve contributed to. We value teamwork and what each individual member brings to the table.
• Carefully review and familiarize yourself with the job description and perform research on Meta and the
role. Be prepared to answer why you are interested in this specific role and in working at Meta.
• Please take the time to review our mission statement and core values. These values influence how we
work together to fulfill our mission to build the future of human connection and the technology that
makes it possible. We also encourage you to take time using our technologies such as Facebook,
Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
• One important piece of advice for your interviews: it’s ok if you don’t know! No one who works at Meta is
an expert in all things, and we don’t look for perfection in the people we interview. If you aren’t sure of
something during your interview, you’re encouraged to ask clarifying questions and be upfront if there are
topics that you have less experience with.
• Prepare thoughtful questions for the interviewer(s). Your interviewer may challenge your ideas, and you
should be ready to speak not only to what you recommend or have experienced but the why as well. It is
important to think outside the box and to approach problems from creative and different perspectives.
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Post interview – What to expect
You can expect your recruiter to provide a specific timeline or updates along the way. Your recruiter will inform
you of next steps after your interview as soon as they are available. Feel free to follow up with them if you have
not heard within a week of your interviews.
Appendix / Resources
Below is a curated list of resources to get started and help you prepare.
Design Practice
• HiredInTech – Algorithm Design Practice
• Grokking the System Design Interview (Video)
• System Design Primer (GitHub)
• HiredInTech System Design for Tech Interviews course
Meta resources
• About Meta website
• Meta Newsroom website
• Meta Careers website
• Culture at Meta website
• Meta employee benefits website
• Interviewing at Meta: The keys to success blog
Update personal information, track interview progress, and send thank you notes.
At any time during the interview process, you can track your progress, send thank-you notes and update your
personal information all via the Career Profile. If you do not receive a link from recruiting, you may create one.
Thank you for taking the time to review this guide!