Facebook m2 interview questions

• Tell me about a time you had to deliver unpleasant news to someone reporting to you.
• What’s your approach to 1-1s? How does your discussion change between ICs and managers? (I got asked exactly this question in my Prepfully mock btw).
• Tell me about the most technically complex project you’ve managed? What made it difficult? How did you resource your team?
• How do you balance autonomy and direction? Tell us about a time you had to move the team in a different direction to what they wanted.
• What do you think are the components to maintain a healthy cross functional dependency?
• A senior leader from a different org has challenged your approach to a specific problem your team is working on, in a weekly standup. What would you do next?
• Red teaming in a large enterprise like Meta, how would an attacker do that?
• What is my vision and strategy for my team for next 12 – 16 months?
• What’s my approach for defining that?
• How were situations, when employees had underperformed and/or difficult periods, handled?
• How do you manage a low performing employee?
• Describe a situation where you had to manage an underperforming employee.
• Talk about your work experience in last one year
• How do you manage career growth of your team
• What do you look for when hiring for a team manager role
• Have you ever fired anyone for low performance
• How do you handle promoting someone as a manager
• How do you communicate about technical project needs with non-technical teams
• Talk about high level system design of a specific project
• What things were done to scale the system
• Using load balancer for memcache servers
• What type of testing strategies can be used to test features
• Looking back what would you have done differently in the project
• What is the value of one-on-one with your reports?
• Can you give me an example on how you manage conflict?

Facebook / Meta engineering manager interview (questions and prep)

1. Interview process and timeline

1.1 What interviews to expect

What’s the Facebook engineering manager interview process and timeline? It takes four to eight weeks on average and follows these steps:

1. Resume, cover letter, and referrals
2. Recruiter phone screen
3. First-round: 1 or 2 interviews
4. Onsite: 5 or 6 interviews

Let’s look at each of these steps in more detail below:

1.1.1 Recruiter phone screen

In most cases, you’ll start your interview process with Facebook by talking to an HR recruiter on the phone. They are looking to confirm that you’ve got a chance of getting the job at all, so be prepared to explain your background and why you’re a good fit at Facebook. You should expect typical behavioral and resume questions like, “Tell me about yourself”,”Why Facebook?“, or “Tell me about your current day-to-day.”

If you get past this first HR screen, the recruiter will then help schedule a first-round interview with a Facebook engineering manager. One great thing about Facebook is that they are very transparent about their recruiting process. Your HR contact will therefore walk you through the remaining steps in the hiring process, and will also share with you a helpful email listing resources you can use to prepare.

1.1.2 First-round: 1 or 2 interviews

The next step after your recruiter call is the first-round interview. This will usually be one 45-60 minute phone call with your hiring manager. It’s possible you may also have a second call that’s more technical.

You can expect to be asked about your experience and past projects, some behavioral questions that aim to get a sense of whether you’d fit into Facebook’s culture, and possibly some technical questions. More on the various question types in section 2 below.

1.1.3 Onsite: 5 or 6 interviews

If you pass the first-round interview, you’ll be invited to do the “onsite”. The onsite interviews are the biggest test for Facebook EM candidates. During this interview loop, you’ll have five or six separate 45-minute interviews with several different interviewers from Facebook, consisting of:

• One people management interview, where you’ll be assessed on your ability to lead people and projects.
• One project retrospective interview where you’ll be asked to deep dive into some of the projects that you’ve worked on.
• One culture fit interview, where you’ll face general behavioral questions that test whether you’ll fit into the Facebook way of working.
• One or two system design interviews, where you’ll need to show you’re familiar with and capable of building highly scalable systems.
• One or two coding interviews, where you’ll solve general coding questions relevant to your role.

[COVID Update] Given the Covid-19 pandemic, your onsite interviews with Facebook will likely be conducted virtually. You can ask your Facebook recruiter for the latest information on their Covid-19 adjustments.

1.2 What happens behind the scenes

Your recruiter is leading the process and taking you from one stage to the next. Here’s what happens behind the scenes at each of the stages described above:

• After the first-round interview(s), the interviewer(s) you talked to has (have) 24h to submit their ratings and notes on the internal system. Your recruiter then reviews the feedback, and decides to move you to the onsite interview or not, depending on how well you’ve done.
• After the onsite, your various interviewers will make a recommendation on hiring you or not and the recruiter compiles your “packet” (interview feedback, resume, referrals, etc.) If they think you can get the job, they will present your case at the next candidate review meeting.
• Candidate review meetings are used to assess all candidates who have recently finished their interview loops and are close to getting an offer. Your packet will be analyzed and possible concerns will be discussed. Your interviewers are invited to join your candidate review meeting, but will usually only attend if there’s a strong disagreement in the grades you received (e.g. 2 no hires, 2 hires). If after discussions the team still can’t agree whether you should get an offer or not, you might be asked to do a follow-up interview to settle the debate. At the end of the candidate review meeting, a hire / no hire recommendation is made for consideration by the hiring committee.
• The hiring committee includes senior leaders from across Facebook. This step is usually a formality and the committee follows the recommendation of the candidate review meeting. The main focus is on fine-tuning the exact level (and therefore the compensation ) you will be offered.

It’s also important to note that hiring managers and people who refer you have little influence on the overall process. They can help you get an interview at the beginning, but that’s about it.

2. Example questions

As we mentioned above, for the position of Facebook engineering manager you’ll face various types of interviews:

• People management
• Project retrospective
• Culture fit
• System design
• Coding

Now let’s take a look at what you can expect from each interview. To help you practice, we’ve provided example questions that we’ve found from our research on Glassdoor. We’ve categorized the questions and we’ve changed the grammar and phrasing in some places to make the questions easier to understand.

If you’re looking for even more practice questions, take a look at our list of 65 engineering manager interview questions.

When you’re preparing, bear in mind that the division between the interview types is not set in stone, and so you should be ready to be asked any type of question in any interview. For example, you may be asked a culture fit type question at the beginning of a system design or coding interview, and likewise you might face some management questions in the project retrospective interview. But as long as you’re prepared on all of them, it shouldn’t be a problem!

2.1 People management interview

Facebook engineering managers need to have superb soft skills in order to lead teams and projects. The people management interview is to test these soft skills and see if you’ve got what it takes to be a leader in Facebook.

You’ll need to show that you can build a team and keep it motivated, solve conflicts and communicate complex concepts. While the focus is mainly on how you manage people, you should also expect the odd project management question.

Let’s look at some of the most frequent examples that we found in the Glassdoor data.

2.2 Project retrospective interview

As an engineering manager, you’ll be taking the lead on high level projects with limited resources, and Facebook will want to see evidence from your past experience that you’ve got what it takes.

In this interview, you’ll be asked to deep dive into one or several of your past projects, going into detail about decisions that you made and the problems that you solved. You may also face some more general “resume” questions that aim to assess your past experience.

Let’s take a look at some example questions.

2.3 Culture fit interview

Whatever the role on offer, Facebook wants to make sure that a candidate is going to fit positively into their culture and values system. This is really important to them.

Therefore, in this interview they’ll be trying and get a sense of your professional background, your personality and your motivation in applying to join Facebook. The “culture fit” interview is often paired with a coding interview in an hour-long session, so don’t be surprised if, after some behavioral questions of the type listed below, the conversation switches to coding.

We’ll get into the coding questions very soon, but for now let’s look at some culture fit question examples.

You may have noticed that these first three interview types that we’ve listed consist of mainly behavioral questions. To dig deeper into how to answer this very common type of interview question, take a look at our guide.

Let’s move onto the next two interview types: system design and coding.

2.4 System design interview

Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp all have 1bn+ monthly active users. Facebook engineering managers therefore need to be able to design systems that are highly scalable, and the system design interviews are your chance to demonstrate your familiarity with such complex systems.

In these interviews you’ll want to show that you can both be creative and structured at the same time. The questions you’ll be asked are typically quite open-ended and feel more like a discussion.

In most cases, your interviewer will adapt the question to your background. For instance, if you’ve worked on an API product they’ll ask you to design an API. But that won’t always be the case, so you should be ready to design any type of product or system at a high level. You’ll need to be thorough in your explanations – often you’ll be expected to draw boxes and arrows on a whiteboard (or online equivalent) to illustrate your answer.

You can expect to be given one or two system design interviews for the Facebook engineering manager role. We’ve analyzed the data on Glassdoor to provide you with some example questions and to give you a broader idea of what you need to prepare for, we’ve included some questions that regular (i.e. non-management) software engineers have been asked and that could also come up in your interview. For even more system design interview questions, including a sample answer, take a look here.