Meta Research Scientist Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 224 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Meta.
Meta
Research Scientist
Entry Difficult Positive experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call
Interview formats
Behavioral
The recruiter was very hands-on and seemed genuinely invested in helping me succeed. I felt supported throughout and was kept informed about each stage of the interview.
Confirmed questions0 questions
No confirmed questions were included in this interview report.
Meta
Research Scientist
Mid Average Positive experience Decline offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Presentation Background check
Interview formats
Technical Presentation Behavioral
The hiring process included a recruiter call, a technical interview, a research interview that involved a job talk or presentation, and a hiring manager interview. Everything was accessible and easy to navigate on the company's website, and the recruiter was very responsive.
Confirmed questions2 questions
- Can you discuss your prior work experience?
- Could you elaborate on your PhD thesis?
Meta
Research Scientist
Intern Average Negative experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Presentation
Interview formats
Coding Presentation Technical
Process was pretty standard. Recruiter contacted me and quickly locked in interview dates. It was the usual setup: one 45 min coding round and then a 45 min research presentation round. Interviewers didn’t really seem interested in doing the interview.
Confirmed questions1 question
- I couldn’t really understand what the interviewer was saying, his English was really bad and he got upset when I asked him to repeat. There were 2 coding problems and then in the other interview you present your research.
Meta Research Scientist Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Meta interview reports.
“Given a knight’s starting square and a destination square on an infinite chess board, compute the smallest number of moves the knight needs to reach the destination.”
Read reports →“What is the loss for a model when its weights are randomly initialized?”
Read reports →“Given an array nums of n integers, with n > 1, return an array output where output[i] is the product of all elements in nums except nums[i], and do it without using division.”
Read reports →“Find all the missing numbers in an array and add each one to a string.”
Read reports →“Given a list of numbers, write a function that returns every pair of indices whose elements add up to a target value.”
Read report →“write functions to allocate and free memory given an array of "available memory" and a list of alloc and free commands to execute”
Read report →“Given a sorted array of numbers, for example [1,1,1,2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,3], find the indices where each distinct number begins and ends (like for 1, start index = 0, end index = 2), and you must do it in log(n) time, not by going through every element with O(n) complexity.”
Read report →“Compute the perimeter of an island surrounded by water, starting from a point inside the island. Follow-up: how would you efficiently implement this if the method is called multiple times, with different starting points but using the same map?”
Read report →“Write a method that sorts strings. What changes if you have a custom ordering of the characters in the alphabet?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 224 Meta interview reports.