Meta engineering manager interview (questions and prep)

Meta (formerly Facebook) engineering manager interviews are really challenging. The questions are difficult, specific to Meta, and cover a wide range of topics.

The good news is that the right preparation can make a big difference and can help you land a job as an engineering manager at Meta. To help you get there, we’ve put together the ultimate guide below. 

Here's an overview of what we'll cover: 

• Process and timeline
• Example questions
  • People management interview
  • Project retrospective interview
  • Culture fit interview
  • System design interview
  • Coding interview
• Preparation tips

If you're applying at Meta for a non-management engineering role, we have guides for production engineer, data engineer, front end engineer and software engineer.

Click here to practice mock interviews with Meta engineering manager interview coaches

1. Interview process and timeline

1.1 What interviews to expect

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

1. Resume screen
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 Resume screen

First, recruiters will look at your resume and assess if your experience matches the open position. This is the most competitive step in the process, as millions of candidates do not make it past this stage.

You can use this free guide to help tailor your resume to the position you’re targeting. 

And if you’re looking for expert feedback, you can also get input from our team of ex-Meta/Facebook recruiters, who will cover what achievements to focus on (or ignore), how to fine tune your bullet points, and more.

1.1.2 Recruiter phone screen

In most cases, you'll start your interview process with Meta 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 Meta. You should expect typical behavioral and resume questions like, "Tell me about yourself","Why do you want to work at Meta?", 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 Meta engineering manager. One great thing about Meta 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.

1.1.3 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 Meta’s culture, and possibly some technical questions. More on the various question types in section 2 below.

1.1.4 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 Meat EM candidates. During this interview loop, you'll have five or six separate 45-minute interviews with several different interviewers from Meta, 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 Meta 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 Meta will likely be conducted virtually. You can ask your Meta 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 Meta. 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 Meta 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

Meta 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 at Meta.

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 Meta 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, Meta 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 Meta. 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. Meta 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 Meta 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.

For a closer look at the system design part of your interview, see our specific guide: Meta system design interview (questions, process, prep)

2.5 Coding interview

Many tech companies don’t ask coding questions for management positions, but Meta does. You can expect one or two of the onsite interviews to be a coding interview, and you may even be asked some coding questions in the first-round.

Meta will want to make sure you’ve got the necessary problem-solving skills and that you can think in a structured way when it comes to code. Interviewers will want to see your thought process, so be sure to provide a narrative as you go through the code.

Below we've listed several coding questions that Meta tends to ask in engineering interviews, according to data from Glassdoor. We’ve taken these questions from regular (non-management) software engineer interviews at Meta, because there is more data available for those roles. However, these questions should also be relevant to management candidates, so you can use them in your preparation.

To make these questions easier to study, we've put divided them into the following categories, with the most frequent first.

1. Arrays / Strings (38% of questions, most frequent)
2. Graphs / Trees (29%)
3. Dynamic Programming (18%)
4. Search / Sort (9%)
5. Linked lists (4%)
6. Stacks / Queues (2%, least frequent)

We've also modified the phrasing to match the closest problem on Leetcode or another resource, and we've linked to a free solution.

Finally, we recommend reading this guide on how to answer coding interview questions and practicing with this list of coding interview examples in addition to those listed below.

In addition to the questions above, you might also encounter a debugging style question, where you’re given a section of code and asked to find the bugs within it. For a more extensive version of this list of coding questions and solutions, go to our Meta software engineer interview article.

3. How to prepare

Now that you know what questions to expect, let's focus on how to prepare. It's no secret that the performance bar at Meta is high. Some people even go as far as quitting their job to prepare for interviews full time.

This is obviously extreme and not what we recommend doing, but it shows how much effort some candidates are ready to put in. Below is our four-step prep plan for Meta. If you're preparing for more companies than just Meta, then check our generic engineering manager interview preparation guide.

3.1 Learn about Meta’s culture

Most candidates fail to do this. But before investing tens of hours preparing for an interview at Meta, you should take some time to make sure it's actually the right company for you.

Meta is prestigious and it's therefore tempting to ignore that step completely. But in our experience, the prestige in itself won't make you happy day-to-day. It's the type of work and the people you work with that will.

If you know engineers who work at Meta or used to work there it's a good idea to talk to them to understand what the culture is like. In addition, we would recommend reading about Meta's 6 core values and Facebook's hacker culture.

3.2 Practice by yourself

As mentioned above, you'll have five types of interviews at Meta: people management, project retrospective, culture fit, system design, and coding. The first step of your preparation should be to brush up on these different types of questions and to practice answering them by yourself.

The people management, project retrospective and culture fit interviews will all consist of mainly behavioral questions. First, consult our leadership, people management, and program/project management primers for tech interviews. Then, we recommend learning our step-by-step method to answer this type of question. In addition, you'll want to write down your answers to the example questions we gave you in the previous section.

For system design interviews, we recommend studying our system design interview prep guide and learning how to answer system design interview questions. These guides cover a step-by-step method for answering system design questions, and they provide example questions with solutions. 

For coding interviews, we recommend using our articles, 73 data structure questions and 71 algorithms questions, which have links to high quality answers to each problem. They are organized by type of data structure or algorithm as well as by difficulty level. Take a look at the following article written by an ex-Facebook interviewer to understand more about a step-by-step approach you can use in a coding interview.

And to practice, we recommend using Leetcode where you can get a lot done with the Free tier, and also access Meta-specific questions using the Premium tier. If you haven’t already, you should also take a look at our Meta software engineer interview article for useful example coding questions and additional information. 

For some really useful general tips on tackling some of the different types of interviews you'll face, see this Meta SWE article (note that this was written for regular, non-management software engineers and so it mentions a slightly different process).

Finally, a great way to practice answering interview questions is to interview yourself out loud. This may sound strange, but it will significantly improve the way you communicate your answers during an interview. Play the role of both the candidate and the interviewer, asking questions and answering them, just like two people would in an interview. Trust us, it really helps!

3.3 Practice with peers

Practicing by yourself will only take you so far. One of the main challenges of coding interviews is to have to communicate what you are doing as you are doing it. As a result, we strongly recommend practicing live coding interviews with a peer interviewing you.

A great place to start is to practice with friends if you can. This can be especially helpful if your friend has experience with EM interviews, or is at least familiar with the process

3.4 Practice with ex-interviewers

Finally, you should also try to practice engineering manager mock interviews with expert ex-interviewers, as they’ll be able to give you much more accurate feedback than friends and peer

If you know an engineering manager who has experience running interviews Meta or another big tech company, then that's fantastic. But for most of us, it's tough to find the right connections to make this happen. And it might also be difficult to practice multiple hours with that person unless you know them really well.

Here's the good news. We've already made the connections for you. We’ve created a coaching service where you can practice 1-on-1 with ex-interviewers from leading tech companies like Meta. Learn more and start scheduling sessions today.