Facebook Interview for Staff Eng level
I am interviewing at Facebook for a Staff engineer level (as told by the recruiter) in about 3 weeks. The recruiter seem to hint that for this level there would be 2 system design interviews and 2 coding interviews with typically 2 coding questions in each interview. Are the coding interview questions for staff level different from Level 3/4 interviews ? There is just no way I can compete with the bright new college grads / younger engineers these days!. So I am hoping there is a slight difference in the coding interviews (and more weight given to system design)..
One of my friend/colleague recently got offered E6 at FB. Here is the breakdown for his case: 1 coding, 1 system design, 1 domain specific system design, 1 domain knowledge with bits and pieces of coding and 1 behavioral. His background is in hardware/SOC level implementation of deep learning algorithms on chip. So the domain specific round focused on implementing accelerating versions of basic matrix-vector algorithms. The coding round wasn’t difficult, I would say leetcode medium but the focus was correctness on edge cases.
Thank you. It is interesting that they did a coding interview even though your friend has HW background.
Actually his background is mixed between hardware and software; it’s more implementing software at the Silicon ( SOC) level. So you can think of embedded systems, parallelizing mathematical operations, GPGPU, assembly programming of complex deep learning systems, etc. His domain specific questions revolves around parallel architectures. Good luck with your interview!!
OP. what level are you I'm Google
I had an E6 offer. My coding questions were pretty standard fare. Only one was a bit tricky, but even that was only really tricky on the follow-up, not the first version. I was also pretty fried by then so I didn't code it, just kind of talked about how it might end up looking. Obviously, ymmv. Definitely ramp up your execution speed a bit, such that things like tree traversals are second nature. I had a decent time with the coding, but it was because I had practice. I had 2 coding interviews, 2 design discussions, and one behavioral, which probably matters a lot more at our level than it does for a fresh grad.
Any reason for turning it down?
Thank you for the insight.
Coding interview is the same at all levels. Whole packet is later reviewed by senior committee and many things are taken into consideration
Coding should be same for all levels.
No first hand experience, but I’ve heard that you’re expected to give more tradeoffs and details about follow-ups than new grads, and it should be similar difficulty. Any reason for the switch?
Thanks. No real reason for switch. I see many Googlers moving to Facebook and hear that things are in-general better for Engineers over there (may be the grass is greener on the other side). So I want to give this a shot. Moreover, I failed Facebook interview (at phone screen level) in 2015 and that kind of left a scar :)
@xoog: best of luck!