Meta Software Engineer Intern Interview Guide

tl;dr

Far from its launch as a localized campus social media platform to one of the most used platforms in the world, Meta now encompasses Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, extensive VR and AR technology like Oculus and Mapillary, and serves a whopping 3.35 billion daily active users.

Software engineering internship interview loops at Meta are standardized and automated, regardless of department and team. Meta seems to prefer software engineering internship candidates with experience in:

• Object-oriented programming
• Functional programming
• Programming languages that reduce latency in large-scale applications, like C++
• Building and debugging scalable projects independently, not just for school

While Meta doesn’t explicitly list expertise in React.js and React Native as requirements for their internships, applicants who can demonstrate that they’ve done their due diligence with Meta’s open-source frameworks have a leg up in interviews.

What does a Meta Software Engineering Intern do?

In 2022, Meta spent $35.3 billion on Research and Development, the third-highest spending company in the world. Interns in Meta’s engineering teams can expect to be at the vanguard of this iterative work, pioneering the programming behind the web applications and servers that connect Meta’s billions of users. While the projects you work on may vary by team, Meta prefers engineers who have expertise accounting for tradeoffs and edge cases as part of outlining optimal solutions, especially at high user volume.

While Meta says that internship candidates can use any industry-standard language (Python, Objective-C, Java, C++, etc.), many engineers there report using C++ most frequently in day-to-day work, since its low latency and high throughput are helpful for Meta’s billions of users.

Relative to the interview loops for interns at comparable “big five” tech companies, Meta’s is shorter and more automated, so getting a referral is more crucial. Meta has a separate recruitment pipeline for referrals, and will reach out to you more quickly than if you’d just cold-applied.

Meta’s internships are at least 12 weeks long and take place in person at one of their 77 US office locations. Like most internships, you’ll have hands-on mentorship, but Meta’s internships are set apart by the amount of responsibility their interns have; you’ll be expected to ship code with as few iterations as possible and with a relatively shallow ramping period, so be ready to hit the ground running.

Interns at Meta are able to receive what they call “return offers” i.e., the opportunity to return as a full-time employee at the end of your term, depending on mentor feedback. Even if you don’t get a return offer, Meta interns don’t have a cooling-off period between finishing their internship and applying for work.

Before you apply

• Research recently asked interview questions at Meta for software engineers
• Prepare for your interview’s algorithm and data structure questions
• Brush up on your C++, since it’s the most commonly used language by Meta engineers
• Check out Meta’s engineering blog and podcast for insights into their latest projects

Interview process

Unlike the full-time software engineering loops at Meta, engineering internship interviews are relatively short, usually with just two stages, and the whole process typically takes 4 weeks, at most. You’ll have 2–3 steps between applying and getting your offer:

• A 70-minute online assessment, or OA, to test your coding skills solo
• An optional 60-minute behavioral survey, similar to a behavioral interview
• A 40-minute tech screen in which a Meta engineer assesses how you problem-solve

While Meta says in its internship interview guide that candidates have an initial phone screen with an engineer, most interviewees within the past year report that they skipped this step. If you’re scheduled for a phone screen, it will likely be with an engineer, not a recruiter, who will ask about your history with the technology on your resume, rather than more traditional behavioral questions. That said, having an answer to the traditional “Why Meta?” question is always a smart idea.

Online assessment

This 70-minute structured assessment will take place on Codesignal. You’ll most likely have four questions that escalate in difficulty and how much creativity you’ll need to solve them. You can use any programming language to answer these questions, but you’ll need to make sure all your tests pass, and that you’re thinking clearly about edge cases and implementation. While Meta doesn’t mention questions about dynamic programming in its intern interview guide, some candidates have reported seeing questions about it, so don’t rule anything out.

Many candidates say they didn’t hear from a recruiter about how they did on their OA, but a good indicator of moving on to the tech screen is your number of test cases. Check out Exponent’s list of recent coding questions asked in Meta engineering interviews, as well as different approaches to answers from fellow applicants.

Some topics include:

• Matrix operations and transposition
• Dynamic Programming
• Binary Trees
• Traversals, including breadth-first search (BFS) and depth-first search (DFS)
• Big-O complexity
• Searches
• Russian Doll algorithm

Recent questions include:

• Can you explain how to perform simultaneous in-order traversal of two binary trees?
• Using recursion, determine whether a given string, s, is a palindrome.
• Explain how to find a target sum in an array.
• Given a square matrix, return the sum of the matrix diagonals. Only include the sum of all the elements on the primary diagonal and all the elements on the secondary diagonal that are not part of the primary diagonal.
• Implement a basic calculator with plus and multiply operations.
• Find the common parent in a binary tree, without using BST.
• Given a 2D array of integers (i.e., envelopes) where envelopes[i] = [wi, hi] represents the width and the height of an envelope. One envelope can fit into another if and only if both the width and height of one envelope are greater than the other envelope's width and height. Return the maximum number of envelopes you can Russian Doll (i.e., put one inside the other) without rotating an envelope.

Optional behavioral survey

Some candidates report getting an optional hour-long online behavioral survey—sent to them between the OA and tech screen—that stands in for a more traditional behavioral interview. Unlike other “big five” companies, Meta doesn’t tend to include hiring managers in their SWE intern interviewing loops at all, or even ask behavioral questions outside of this survey.

While the questions you’ll see on the survey are more about who you are as a candidate than the code you write, you’ll still need to think about your behavior in the context of engineering projects and team structures, unlike more traditional behavioral interviews, which tend to ask abstract “tell me about a time” questions out of context.

You’ll be given a timed set of scenario-based questions and asked to evaluate them on a scale of “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Another factor sets Meta’s approach to behavioral interviewing apart from other tech companies. Where a more traditional behavioral interviewer may want to see how you slow down and evaluate all sides of a disagreement, Meta’s behavioral survey wants to see how you can unblock yourself and others quickly, in the spirit of their “move fast and break things” ethos.

Some topics include:

• Instances of failing to meet a deadline, as both a team and an individual
• Times you identified a significant area of improvement, and how to move forward
• How you deal with blockers on a project, especially from other teams

Recent questions include:

• You realize that a pre-existing feature has a noticeable bug that could potentially cause a security exploit. Your team, manager, and PM haven’t noticed it yet.
• You’re working on a project with a PM and a member of a non-technical team, and their priorities and timelines conflict with yours.
• You are unable to meet your goals because another member of your team is blocked.
• You notice an engineer on your team a few levels above you has made a mistake, one that could cause major bugs if their code is deployed.
• After talking to another developer on your team, you both realize that adopting a new piece of technology would make both your work easier.
• Your skip-level manager is obsessed with your team implementing a new framework that makes your whole team’s work slower, and they don’t seem to realize the framework is the cause.

Tech screen

This 40-minute interview will be conducted with a Meta engineer, who will give you two coding problems to solve. Unlike the OA, which focuses more on binary “do you know this” type of skill questions, these problems will test how you use your advanced data structures and algorithmic knowledge to creatively solve more abstract problems. For additional insight into the types of data structures and algorithms to review, check out some recently asked Meta tech screen questions (and their answers).

Your interviewer will still assess your ability to pass all tests efficiently, but they’ll also look for how you explain your thinking out loud, what kind of questions you ask, and how you handle frustration, especially under time constraints. Additionally, they’ll expect you to be able to perform a “dry run” of your code to perform its functionality.

Some topics include:

• Sorts, especially bubble sort
• Graph traversals
• Merge sort
• Recursion
• Hash tables
• Hash maps
• Binary trees
• Array methods
• Latency reduction

Recent questions include:

• Implement an iterator over a binary search tree (BST). Your iterator will be initialized with the root node of a BST.
• Explain the sliding window algorithm.
• Implement a given set of operations of a queue using stacks.
• Implement a function that takes a binary tree and returns a level order traversal of its nodes.

Additional resources

• Take Exponent’s Software Engineering course to level up your algorithms and data structures skills, and try our Behavioral Interview course to ace Meta’s behavioral survey
• Get coaching for actionable feedback from software engineers at Meta
• Prep with mock interviews on the most commonly asked engineering questions

FAQs

How should I prepare for a Meta Software Engineering Internship interview?

• Research recently asked interview questions at Meta for software engineers
• Prepare for your interview’s data structures questions with Exponent’s prep course
• Brush up on your C++, since Meta engineers use it to reduce latency
• Check out Meta’s engineering blog and podcast for insights into their latest projects

How much do Meta Meta Software Engineering Interns make?

The average hourly compensation may vary based on your location, but will probably be between $45–60/hr, as well as potential for other stipends for housing and relocation. Current Meta interns also mention receiving transportation stipends at higher rates than other “big five” companies that ask their interns to relocate.

How long is the Meta Meta Software Engineering Internship interview process?

Most candidates report that the interview process for software engineering internships at Meta takes about 4 weeks from start to finish.

Will my internship be in person?

Yes. Even though all interviewing is done remotely, if you get offered a Meta internship, you’ll be expected to work at one of their 77 US offices.

If I get rejected, how long should I wait before re-applying?

Meta has a “cooling-off period,” so if you get rejected, wait six months if you do well in your interviews (i.e., your tests pass, and your code works in the OA) or up to a year if you don’t.