E5 at Meta

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Phone Screening Round60 min

   The phone screening was more like a warm-up session Spiral matrix variant, the first problem was a variation of the classic Spiral Matrix. Instead of just moving in four cardinal directions, this variant required changing direction every two steps. It was an interesting twist, and I was asked to print the traversal based on these changes. The second problem was about finding the Kth largest element in a stream of integers,i used a min-heap to efficiently track the top K elements while processing the stream.

   • Spiral matrix
   • Finding the Kth largest element in a stream of integers
2. 2

   System Design180 min

   I cleared the phone screening, the real fun began with the onsite interviews, which were split into system design, coding, and behavioral rounds. This was a challenging design question, i was asked to design a real-time leaderboard system for a multiplayer online game. The second system design question was around designing Google Drive with version control and collaborative editing.

3. 3

   Coding Round 160 min

   Problem was about determining if a string can be segmented into dictionary words LFU Cache

   • Word Break
   • LFU Cache
4. 4

   Coding Round 260 min

   For first, I solved this by sorting the meeting start and end times, and then using a sweep line algorithm to count the number of concurrent meetings. The second problem was about counting the number of strictly increasing subsequences in an array, solved using dynamic programming approach, where I maintained an array to store the number of increasing subsequences ending at each element.

   • Meeting Scheduler
   • Longest Increasing Subsequence
5. 5

   Behavioral Round60 min

   We talked about things like dealing with unclear requirements, juggling multiple deadlines, mentoring new team members. I shared real examples from my work, how I broke down messy problems, managed my time, helped juniors get up to speed, and relied on experience when full information wasn’t available.

What came up