Meta Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — E5 Full Loop with a Card-Deck AI Coding Round

Recruiter reachout came in late February. After that, every step got scheduled about a month out — the whole process moved at a pretty relaxed pace.

Phone Screen

LC 65 (medium; also the second question from a 12/4 compiled coding list on the forum).

VO (virtual onsite)

Coding: LC 121; LC 199

AI coding: a card deck problem

BQ: favorite project (scope/complexity) / conflict resolution / moving fast / volunteering on an important project (leadership) / cross-team/cross-function collaboration / constructive feedback from a manager

System design: design a queue service (e.g. Kafka)

System design: design a taxi-hailing service (like Uber), though the requirements were a bit different from Uber's — it needed to support a lot of drivers accepting ride requests at the same time, the user picks one driver, and the driver the user picked then has to accept.

A few extra notes: the LeetCode questions were all slight variations on the originals, but the core idea never changed. I ran into a number of interviewers who were genuinely friendly and easy to talk to. I bought a month of HelloInterview specifically to prep for system design, and it was worth it. In the past I always just improvised BQ on the spot, but this time I prepped strictly with the HelloInterview framework and the interviewer was clearly happy with it — that's when it hit me that a lot of my past interviews probably failed because my BQ was too weak. Unfortunately I hadn't reviewed the two system design topics I actually got very well, and I paced myself too slowly in the moment. I think SD2 is probably a fail. Planning to come back and try again.