Meta Applied Scientist Interview Experience — Sandbox Print Bug Sank the OA, Rejected Anyway

Meta·Applied Scientist·Aug 2025
Technical ScreenOnline AssessmentRejectedmedium

Got an OA, four questions, 90 minutes.

It was a banking system. The first question was to write functions for generating accounts, depositing money, transferring money, and so on. The second question was to write a function that sorts all accounts by outgoing transaction volume, then based on an input n, outputs the top n accounts. For example if n=3, you had to output the top three accounts by outgoing transaction volume. When outputting, you also had to generate a string combining the outgoing transaction volume and the account number, and output those strings — if the outgoing transaction count was the same, you sorted by account number ascending. That descending-then-ascending combo had me completely confused for a good while.

I was actually going for an Applied Scientist role, not SDE, so I figured I'd just give it a shot. I'd only ground through a few LeetCode problems before coming in, and on top of that I couldn't get print to work and my test cases kept failing... In the 90 minutes I only got to 2 of the 4 problems, and I didn't get either of them right. The single most important thing is to use the link the recruiter sends beforehand to get used to this environment and debug it ahead of time — apparently you have to run it inside the sandbox for print to actually work.

Phone screen: LC791, LC314.

I got both phone screen questions working, but probably because the OA was so bad, I still got rejected.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Meta
Role
Applied Scientist
Rounds
Online Assessment → Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Aug 2025
Questions from this interview
3 questions

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