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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Mercor
Mercor Software Engineer interview with a three-section HackerRank assessment
After I applied, the first step was an online HackerRank-style assessment with three sections. It covered data and algorithms, data pipelines, and SQL-style questions, so I had to move between very different problem types one after another. A short time later, I had a 30-minute conversation with the hiring manager. That discussion felt mostly behavioral, with some technical back-and-forth mixed i…
Interview experiences · Mercor
Mercor Software Engineer interview with an Apple Silicon compatibility check
The interview was conducted by an AI agent, and I could complete it by phone or computer. The process itself was fairly straightforward, with the AI asking questions based on my submissions. The problem came with the compatibility check in the middle of the process. They specifically checked whether I was using Apple Silicon Macs. That felt like a major miss to me because the tools I needed weren…
Interview experiences · Mercor
Mercor Software Engineer interview with concurrency and Redis
My interview was brief, around 30 minutes. The interviewer gave me some code and asked me to make it more robust. He nudged me toward concurrency and distributed-systems thinking, including how to process CSV data and coordinate synchronization with Redis. I felt behind because I was still early in graduate school and didn't have deep experience with that specific concurrency and distributed-syst…
Interview experiences · Mercor
Mercor Software Engineer interview with resume-tailored AI questions
I went through an interview flow that was entirely AI-based, and I found it surprisingly efficient. The AI generated questions tailored to my resume and the job description, and the experience felt almost human, more like a real conversation than a cold checklist. The questions covered system design prompts and coding and code-practice topics, and I usually had enough time to think through my ans…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Applied Scientist Interview Experience — Sandbox Print Bug Sank the OA, Rejected Anyway
Got an OA, four questions, 90 minutes. It was a banking system. The first question was to write functions for generating accounts, depositing money, transferring money, and so on. The second question was to write a function that sorts all accounts by outgoing transaction volume, then based on an input n, outputs the top n accounts. For example if n=3, you had to output the top three accounts by o…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — 25 Min SQL, 25 Min Python, and I Only Passed One of Each
I've been pretty happy at my current company and honestly wasn't planning to switch jobs. A recruiter from Meta reached out to me a few times, though, so I went into the interview with a just-try-it-and-see attitude. Technical round (25 min SQL + 25 min Python) I hadn't touched LeetCode in a long time. The questions weren't super hard, but they were tricky. The interviewer spoke excellent English…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — A Confusing Building-Capacity Coding Problem Plus SQL on the Library Schema
Python Questions 1 and 2 are basically the same as the ones posted yesterday. For question 1, I got a follow-up: how do you write it without heapq. For question 2, the log list's true/false values need to alternate, and you also have to consider that a book needs to be checked out before it can be returned — otherwise that's wrong too. Question 3 is a new one I'd never seen before and it's a bit…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — Four Onsite Rounds in One Day
Four rounds total, all held on the same day, with a lunch break in between: Round 1: ETL technical Round 2: Data modeling Round 3: ETL technical (leaning more toward real-time processing) Round 4: Behavioral + ownership-related HR calls ahead of time to explain what each round covers, so the overall schedule is pretty clear. The first two rounds lean toward data modeling and traditional batch pro…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — Missed the 3-for-3 SQL/Python Bar in a 25+25 Screen
I've actually been pretty happy at my current job and wasn't planning to switch. A Meta recruiter reached out to me a few times, so I figured I'd interview just to see how it would go. Technical round (25 minutes of SQL + 25 minutes of Python) I hadn't grinded LeetCode in a long time. The questions weren't too hard, but they were tricky. The interviewer spoke excellent English and gave me a lot o…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — Onsite Loop: Product Sense, Data Modeling, Python, SQL
Product Sense (10 minutes) Try to keep your answers fairly brief. Prepare 4-6 main metrics and you don't need to explain in much detail why you picked each one, unless you feel the interviewer wants to hear more or they ask directly. Every interviewer's expectations are a little different, but overall I felt they don't dig in that deep, so don't spend too much time preparing for this part. The qu…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — Three Onsite Case Studies on Private Accounts, Carpooling, and Netflix
The overall experience was okay — at least all the interviewers were superficially friendly. But two of them were more than 5 minutes late. For every product sense question, they'd first ask you how you understood the product, then ask what dimensions there were (at this stage they just wanted a high-level list of entities), and finally what metrics you'd use. The first question was a new one, ab…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer Interview Experience — Three VO Rounds (Reel, Car Rental, Carpool) End in an Add-On Interview
I prepared for the VO for a long time, and I still ended up getting an add-on interview — I can accept that outcome. I'm hoping someone kind who's been through an add-on interview can share the question bank!! Will they pull from question types that come up a lot but I wasn't asked, or will they pull from really old questions? I've read a lot of other add-on interview posts and haven't gotten any…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Engineer interview with timed SQL, Python, modeling, and product scenarios
After recruiter outreach, I went through a structured set of rounds built around speed and clear problem solving. The recruiter call covered role fit and process details. Then came a technical screen with several SQL and Python tasks under tight time limits. I had to keep working until each task was fully resolved with the expected results, while the interviewers kept returning to my thought proc…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Science Analytics PhD Summer Intern Interview Experience — A Monetization Case Built Around a Messenger P2P Payments Feature
This was for the Data Science, Analytics (PhD) summer intern position. The interviewer's background was in monetization. His questions followed pretty much the standard pattern you see on the forum — business goal / metric / experiment — and then he dug into specific points based on what I said. Roughly, he asked: Do you think it would be worth adding a Venmo-like peer-to-peer money transfer feat…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Science Manager Interview Experience — Six VO Rounds, None Matched the Forum's Question Bank
Since I looked at basically all the interview reports for the IC track, most of the time people are just going back and forth between the same cases from the past two years: AR, 4 cases: Restaurant recommendation IG shopping FB group/circle FB vs. IG AE, 4 cases: Fake accounts Fake news Comment distribution Ads inserted into the feed I've already summarized it like this, so go search the specific…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — 3 of 4 Onsite Rounds Done, Last Round Pushed Two Weeks
I finished 3 out of 4 rounds of my virtual onsite yesterday, so while it's still fresh in my memory, let me share the experience. The reason I only finished 3/4 is that right after the third round, the recruiter told me the final Technical session needed to be rescheduled — it ended up getting pushed two weeks out. Such a slow death (I originally wanted to get through the whole thing in one day,…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — AR, AE, SQL, and BQ Onsite Rounds, No Offer
Honestly, way too many people have been copying interview notes over to Xiaohongshu lately, so I've set some limits on mine — I don't want to be scrolling xhs and suddenly run into my own interview notes, lol. AR: Felt like a new question — hadn't seen it in recent interview notes. The question was: suppose you're on the ads team and you built a new ad recommendation model, how would you go about…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — Four Onsite Rounds, One AR Question Asked Twice
Behavior round: challenging project, diversity, differences in working style, learning. The interviewer was really nice and easy to talk to. AR (Ad Recommendation) round: talking with the interviewer felt really comfortable, and they were very good at controlling the pace of the interview. SQL round: Active Ad Revenue based on different creation source. The question changed a little from what I w…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — Offer on Christmas Eve After a Screen and a VO
Got the offer on Christmas Eve — sharing it back with the forum. Timeline: Oct 29 — a university recruiter reached out Nov 19 — screening interview with the interviewer Dec 19 — VO (virtual onsite) with the interviewer Dec 24 — offer I was genuinely swamped at the end of the year, and on top of that I knew nothing about product case questions or SQL, so I ended up dragging this whole process out.…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — Onsite Loop with a SQL Live-Coding Slip
AR (Circle): A lot of the questions had already shown up in earlier interview reports, but the interviewer followed up heavily based on how I answered, and I'm honestly not sure whether I actually landed on what she was looking for. AE (Ads in Feed): Most of it was also questions from prior interview reports. The interviewer had a fairly strong accent and her questions weren't always clear, so it…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — Recruiter Flagged a Red Flag on My SQL Metric
AE: The euro-chat question — there's a chatbot used for B2C customer service, and the question was how you'd define success, testing, etc. Behavioral: Standard questions. SQL: The shop visibility question. Overall pretty standard questions, and the last part asked me to define my own metric to prove whether new shops are more active. Afterward the recruiter's feedback said I had a red flag on thi…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — Same Forum-Famous Questions, Completely Different Numbers
SQL: Active Ads AR: Ads algorithm AE: Fake account Behavioral: Breakthrough project, disagreeing with someone, reporting to someone new to the team, how to make others feel welcome These are all old questions from the forum — really grateful to everyone who shared before me. Though it might be because they're old questions, the interviewer had changed them. The SQL one especially — same framework…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — SQL and A/B Testing Screen, No Offer
There were 2 SQL questions — one to calculate a total and one to calculate a percentage. Neither question was hard, but given how demanding Meta interviews are, you need to think through a lot of edge cases, or you might be done for. The case study covered A/B testing and stats estimation. Also not hard, but you had to grasp the key points accurately and quickly. For A/B testing they wanted to te…
Interview experiences · Meta
Meta Data Scientist Interview Experience — SQL and Product Questions Built Around Ads Pixel
I interviewed at Meta last Friday, and Monday evening I got an email from the recruiter saying I passed — coming back to report on this. Both the SQL and the product question were built around ads pixel, which I'd almost never seen in previous interview writeups before. There were two SQL questions total, both pretty simple. The first was a simple aggregation. The second asked about the relations…