FB Engineering Manager Interview
Hi, I have an upcoming interview and I'm curious to know if my lack of experience working on large scalable systems will drastically hurt my chances of being hired. I'm obviously learning distributed system design to be prepared for the system design interviews but point being that I haven't actually implemented them. I know a few of the sections are related to talking about your past projects and questions can go in depth so I'm concerned they will find my pretty straightforward, on-prem implementations of internally-used software pathetic. Just wondering what I can do to improve my chances and any other advice/examples folks have related to interviews. TC: 60k
First and foremost, if you have any questions about what will be covered and what interviewers will evaluate you for, reach out to your recruiter! Facebook has a fantastic and supportive recruiting team and they are all very interested in your success. Just let they know your concerns. I interviewed twice to FB, second time recently, waiting to hear feedback from the debrief. Here’s my experience with those two sessions you mentioned: Systems design: Knowing how to scale computation and data is fundamental and assumed you known it well. You don’t need to have designed systems at the scale of Facebook to understand how to design a scalable system. That’s the bare minimum for that interview. They will explore a lot your thought process to find a solution for the problem before you even consider drawing an architecture. This is not a high level interview you can just gloss over things. You need to think about trade-offs and explain why your decision following one approach vs other is ideal in the context of the problem you are solving. You do not necessarily need to solve the entire problem in the 45 minutes of interview and the interviewer will ask you questions to help guiding you to a good technical solution, but you should drive the conversation. Projects Background: Not very technical. They will ask about a substantial project you led, what was the problem it solved, what was the definition of success for that given project as well as the impact this project created. How you scoped it and who did you partnered with. They may ask about technical stuff but on a very high level. This is more focused in infer if you are a metric driven leader. Again, reach out to your recruiter and make sure you understand well what each session is about, good luck with your interview, and congratulations for making it thus far!
Thanks Carta. Did you attend an EM interview? If so, how was the coding round?
Yes, I did. I also found that very weird. I interviewed both to Google and Twitter and none of them asked me to code. Although, the exercise wasn’t hard at all. It seems more like a check if you know how to solve problems. It was harder to remember specific syntax of the language than solving the problem itself. I got a leetcode easy/medium problem involving arrays. I have not even prepared for the coding interview and could complete the exercise without using the 15 mins buffer time. Don’t worry too much about that. The hardest part is the systems design interview.
@Carta - thanks so much! This gives me a lot of confidence. I wish you the best in getting the job you desire :) let us know how it goes
You’re welcome! Let us know how did it go for you when you finish the virtual on-site rounds.
Update: All rounds went well and I got super positive feedback. Getting my packet to the hiring committee this week. 🤞
@carta what is your current mgmt experience . How big is your team and did you know in advance for what level you have been interviewed for in google/fb
10 years of experience in management, current team with 17 engineers and other two managers reporting to me
Thanks.
How was the interview? I am also scheduled for an EM role. WOuld love to hear more thoughts.
What exactly you want to know about? I just replied on a thread above that all went well for me and my packet is being analyzed by the hiring committee. Let me know if I can help with anything specific.
Did you get it?
How soon did you hear back?
Don’t know anything about FB interviews, but hope you are able to convert that 60k to 560k. Good luck!