Meta

What they grade on

• Product-first framing — you connect the design to real user impact
• End-to-end coverage — from API to storage to failure modes in 45 minutes
• Explicit trade-offs — always compare at least two options
• Communication cadence — you drive the interview, not the interviewer
• Depth on 1–2 areas the interviewer probes

Deal breakers

• Silence when asked 'what would you do differently?'
• Refusing to make a decision
• No API before diving into architecture
• No consideration of privacy or abuse for a user-facing feature

Super helpful signals

• Naming a real Meta system or paper (TAO, F4, MyRocks, Scribe, Delos, Owl) as precedent
• A crisp abuse-prevention story for user-generated content
• Talking about impact on the news-feed ranking pipeline

Delivery advice

• Open with the product story: 'so a user opens Instagram, taps stories…' Ground everything in a user flow.
• Draw a small API (3–5 endpoints) before you draw architecture. The API is your contract with the interviewer.
• Every 10 minutes, pause and say 'here's what we've covered, here's what's next' — this earns communication points.
• When asked about scale, always give numbers before diagrams. 'Feed is read-heavy — 100:1 read:write, ~1M QPS peak' beats any picture.
• For any user-facing feature, sprinkle a privacy/abuse thought naturally.

Red flags to avoid

• Starting with microservices without justifying
• Silence on failure modes
• Vague answers to 'how does this scale?'