Meta | Software Engineer | Interview Experience
Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Not specified
Difficulty: Not specified
Interview Process
I applied for the Software Engineer position in Data Infrastructure and was selected for an interview. The coding interview focused on topological sorting of dependencies. I wrote the code smoothly but spent a lot of time debugging, ultimately failing to pass the test cases. The interviewer was from India and after presenting the problem, he left for about five minutes. I realized too late that I only needed to write a function without needing to implement a main function, which wasted a lot of time. After reflecting on the interview, I discovered that I had incorrectly written the in-degree of the dependencies, which was quite embarrassing. Surprisingly, I received a verbal offer a couple of days later.
The second part of the interview was a coding challenge on rate limiting. The first question was straightforward, but the second question involved adding user and experience, which I approached using two separate queues. I struggled with a hidden test case that I couldn’t get to pass and spent a lot of time debugging, even discovering issues with the provided solution.
For the system design portion, I was asked to design a system to display, in near real-time, how many friends have played a game and the total number of players for that game, capable of scaling to 10 million users and 100,000 games. I had not prepared for this section and felt unprepared.
Technical Questions
- Rate Limiter (Queue, Deque, Sliding Window)
- Entity Rate Limiter (Dictionary, Deque, Sliding Window)
Tips & Insights
- Make sure to clarify the problem requirements before diving into coding to avoid wasting time.
- Practice system design questions and familiarize yourself with scalability challenges.
- Debugging can take a significant amount of time; ensure you have a clear understanding of the problem before starting.