u/Davideeeeeeeee94

I want to preface this by saying I consider myself a below average programmer. I still count on my fingers for simple arithmetic, I google how to initialize an array at least once a week, and medium Leetcode questions sometimes take me a full day just to understand what the problem is asking. 12 years of experience as a senior software engineer at a bank in Toronto, 50 to 60 hour workweeks, Zoom calls and no algorithmic work day to day.

Preparation

I completed around 200 Leetcode questions total. Early on I could not solve problems independently and the ones I got through used nested conditionals and consistently hit TLE. I switched to reading editorial solutions immediately instead of attempting cold solves.

My strategy was to identify the top 50 to 100 Meta-tagged questions on Leetcode and repeat each solution a minimum of five times until I could reproduce it from memory, including brute force variants and common follow-up questions. Total prep time was five months, blocked from 5am to 9am on weekdays and weekends.

Recruiter Screen

LinkedIn outreach from a Meta recruiter. One informal call, no technical component.

Technical Phone Screen (45 mins)

Two problems pulled from the Meta-tagged questions on Leetcode:

• Stack-based parentheses validation problem
• Palindrome problem with a hard-level follow-up, approach explanation only, no coding required

My approach each round: disclose upfront if I had seen the problem before, state my approach verbally, write pseudocode, walk through boundary conditions and time/space complexity, then ask for confirmation before writing any code.

Online Onsite

Coding Round 1:

• Subarray Sum Equals K (two variants: all positive integers, then allowing negative integers)
• Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Coding Round 2:

• Lowest Common Ancestor (second instance, different problem variant)
• Merge K Sorted Arrays (note: the Leetcode version uses linked lists, the actual question used arrays)

System Design:

• Ticketmaster-style distributed ticketing system, reduced scope
• Used Grokking the System Design Interview to structure responses covering requirements, capacity estimation, API design, data modeling, and component architecture

Behavioral:

• Prepared using Meta-specific behavioral question lists from Google search and YouTube
• Referenced Careervidz on YouTube for structured STAR-format answer templates

Outcome

Received an offer at E4/L4 eight days after the final round. Also received rejections from Amazon and Coinbase during the same preparation cycle.