This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by OA VO Interview
Hello everyone, I would like to share my experience of interviewing for the Meta E4 Software Engineer (Infrastructure Team) position in the US. Unfortunately, after so much effort, I was rejected, and I feel very discouraged and exhausted.
Background and Preparation
I passed the phone screening (primarily reviewing the top 100 Meta interview questions). I used Hello Interview for intensive preparation on system design. I also participated in mentor-guided courses and conducted mock interviews. For this position, I studied from morning to night, truly giving it my all.
Interview Process
*Round 1: Coding *
Q: Alphabetical combinations of phone numbers
The core idea of this question is to use recursion, or backtracking. First, determine the edge case: whether the string length is 0. When constructing the recursion, you need to define the boundary conditions for when to exit the recursion. The local condition is that the recursion should exit when the number of recursions equals the array length. For non-boundary cases, iterate through the first path, then consider the nth and n+1th paths based on the first one.
Essentially, this is the idea of mathematical induction: start from the 0th, then find the nth, and then find the n+1th. The idea here is to construct n strings, first enumerate the first one, and then gradually enumerate the n-1th ones. Whether it's recursion or backtracking, more practice is needed.
Round 2: System Design
Q: Distributed Counter
This question has the following key points. Storage: What should the schema for Redis caching look like? Besides Redis in-memory caching, do we need other types of storage? Does Redis need to be distributed storage?
Data Processing: Streaming data processing or batch data processing. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? What are the differences between their respective frameworks? Read Flow: How can we support high read traffic while maintaining high write traffic? If reading data from Redis, how can we ensure the real-time nature of the data in Redis, and what are the trade-offs?
Round 3: Coding
Q: Building With an Ocean View
The approach for this question is straightforward: if there is no taller building to the right of each house, then it can see the ocean. We need to find the submax to the right, so we move from right to left, find the current max, and if the current h is greater than max, then it can see the ocean, and we record the current h as the new max. We can skip the sort function and directly use res[::-1]. [::-1] is a slicing operation, where:
-1 indicates a step size of -1, meaning it iterates from the last element to the first element of the list, taking all elements in reverse order. Therefore, res[::-1] creates a new list where the elements are in reverse order compared to res.
Round 4: Behavioral
The questions I was asked:
Q1: At work, what do you do when you disagree with a colleague?
Q2: Have you ever exceeded task requirements?
Q3: Have your suggestions ever been adopted by others?
I answered all behavioral questions well. The interview ended 10 minutes early. I felt the interviewers were quite satisfied. After this round, I was confident, but the subsequent results were a major blow.
Interview Summary & Suggestions
I really don't know where I went wrong. Maybe it was a small mistake in the programming section? Maybe it was the missing part in the system design? I don't think these mistakes should have led to rejection, especially since I had already corrected them. I'm very disappointed because I prepared for a long time. This was a crucial opportunity for me. Has anyone else experienced a similar situation? What should I do next?
If you've also faced difficulties and challenges in interviews, feel free to come here to find solutions!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by OA VO Interview
OA VO Interview | Sciencx (2025-08-21T10:09:14+00:00) Meta E4 Software Engineer Interview Experience: I was rejected!. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/08/21/meta-e4-software-engineer-interview-experience-i-was-rejected/
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