Meta Interview Experience

Overview

Meta, one of the FAANG companies, hires frontend engineers who are expected to demonstrate strong fundamentals well beyond client framework usage. This interview experience documents a candidate's journey applying for a Frontend Engineer position around November 2021, including three months of dedicated preparation and the outcome of the first technical round.

Interview Process

The recruitment timeline unfolded in the following sequence:

• Application (November 2021): The candidate submitted an application for a Frontend Engineer position.
• Initial Contact (after ~1 month): A recruiter from Meta's talent team reached out via email to schedule a phone screen.
• Recruiter Phone Screen: The HR representative explained the Meta interview process and shared official preparation material relevant to the role.
• Technical Phone Screen: A live coding interview lasting roughly 50 minutes with an engineer who had approximately four to five years of experience.
• Outcome: The candidate did not advance beyond this first technical round.

Preparation Phase

Although the role was designated as a frontend position, the candidate noted that FAANG companies typically expect strong competency in Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) in addition to framework knowledge. Over a three-month preparation window, the candidate focused on the following areas:

JavaScript Fundamentals

• Closures
• Prototype inheritance
• Promises
• Hoisting
• Asynchronous JavaScript

Data Structures and Algorithms

The candidate practiced easy and medium difficulty LeetCode-style problems, completing fewer than 100 problems in total before the interview.

Component Building and Polyfills

Drawing from the preparation material, the candidate recognized that interviewers may ask candidates to build UI components from scratch or implement utility methods similar to those in libraries such as lodash. Practice projects included a stopwatch, tic-tac-toe, search interface, autocomplete widget, and infinite scroll implementation.

Technical Rounds

Round 1: Live Coding Interview

The first technical round consisted of two coding problems.

Question 1: DOMStore Implementation

The interviewer asked the candidate to implement a class called DOMStore capable of associating arbitrary values with DOM elements. The expected interface was: