I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Meta (Menlo Park, CA)
Interview
Several recruiter calls followed by many tedious and all-encompassing interview stages spread across 2-3 months: 2 screening rounds and 4-5 interview rounds covering coding (LeetCode-esque), operating systems theory & practice, system design concepts, Linux troubleshooting, and the usual behavioral questions. Months of prep work is necessary to even have a shot. I only stuck with the process because the precariously high cost of living in California all but requires a big tech job nowadays.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding - string manipulation, list manipulation, file handling; see LeetCode company tagged problems but it mostly comes down to luck, i.e. have you seen this before?
Behavioral - the usual "tell me about a time..." questions
System Design - won't share too much here but check out some of the most popular Meta Research papers and conference presentations for ideas on what systems to study
Operating Systems - a lot comes down to having years of Linux experience tbh, but check out Michael Kerrisk's "The Linux Programming Interface", Julia Evans' "Wizard Zines", and play around with a Linux distro for some starting points
Systems Troubleshooting - Linux system administration knowledge helps a lot here. Use Fernando Duran's SadServers.com for some practice. Check out Brendan Gregg's content and know the "USE Method" and the "Linux Performance Analysis in 60000 Milliseconds" articles by heart.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Meta
Interview
The interviewer was very friendly. I had prepared a lot of Linux troubleshooting knowledge, but was not asked any questions about it at all. So I totally screwed up. The coding interview was easy, just csv data processing questions, and complexity.
The recruiters believe an engineer who codes only in Java or C# are considered to be fit for their roles. An engineer who does active coding in any other languages such as python or in any other languages are not expected to be good fit and hence the recruiters reject those engineers