Meta Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Onsite Loop With ML System Design, BQ, and an AI-Enabled Coding Round

Meta·Machine Learning Engineer·Jan 2026
Onsitehard

ML system design: One question was a common one — nearby place recommendation for mobile users who might be on the move. The other one I hadn't seen before — notification ranking. These notifications come from various products, like new product announcements, friends' new updates, and ads served by advertisers, and so on.

BQ: Right off the bat they had me talk about my most proud project. Then they went into a whole series of follow-ups based on that — challenges, how I handled being pushed back on, people who were hard to work with. Then they asked about past failures, and constructive feedback I'd received. At the end they briefly asked what areas I plan to keep improving on going forward.

Coding: Given a sequence of numbers, find the second largest permutation you can form from them. For example, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] -> 54312, [1, 1, 5] -> 151. The second question was: given m increasing sequences, output the smallest K numbers among them.

AI-enabled coding: Find subset of words with max unique characters without duplicates. I think this problem is nasty — neither Sonnet nor Opus could give the optimal solution to pass the third and fourth test cases. The third test case had a few thousand words, and the fourth had over ten thousand. Meta always says they don't test DP, but I think you still need to review it — otherwise the agent is too dumb to come up with a DP approach on its own and you fail.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Meta
Role
Machine Learning Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Difficulty
hard
Interview date
Jan 2026
Questions from this interview
3 questions

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