Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Majority of engineers dream of working at Facebook, but only a few get in. Facebook tech interviews are not easy to crack. The questions are challenging, even more so for senior levels and managerial roles. The Facebook engineering manager interview questions, for example, can be multidimensional where you need to not only need to showcase your technical prowess but also other management and behavioral skills. Strategic, well-rounded preparation is the only way to crack a Facebook Engineering Manager interview.

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In this article, we will cover the following topics to help you with your prep:

• What Does an Engineering Manager Do at Facebook?
• Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Process
• Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Preparation
• Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Questions
• Tips for Facebook Engineering Manager Interview
• FAQs on Facebook Engineering Manager Interview

What Does an Engineering Manager Do at Facebook?

Before you start your prep, you should be well aware of what the engineering manager role at Facebook entails. It’s a high-caliber job that requires collaboration, planning, and people management. To summarize, an engineering manager at Facebook must:

• Build high-performing teams, where engineers do high-impact work that not only benefits the company but also up-levels their career
• Sets direction and goals for the team
• Supports engineers in their career growth
• Ensures the team has inspiring visions for the future

The specific job role may differ depending on the team you’re working with.

Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Process

The Facebook Engineering Manager interview has three interview rounds:

• Phone Screen
• Technical Onsite
• Behavioral Round

There will be many questions specific to your experience, Facebook, and some coding questions in the Phone Screen round. It will just be an initial technical screening to know if you can code well and let you proceed with the onsite interview.

Onsite interviews will have multiple interviews focussing on different skills and capabilities, like coding interviews, system and product design interviews, and behavioral interviews.

Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Preparation

Landing a job at Facebook is not easy. Some engineers go as far as quitting their current job to prepare full-time for Facebook’s interview. Here, we have listed a few pointers to help you with your prep.

Learn About Facebook

For Facebook, their work culture is very important. When they hire an employee, they see whether that employee is a culture fit. You can reach out to people working at Facebook on LinkedIn to understand their work culture.

You must also get a good understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the specific post you’re applying for. This will help you structure your prep.

Resume Building

Once you are clear about Facebook’s work culture and the role, update your resume so that it reflects the requirements. Ensure you highlight work that reflects Facebook’s core values, principles, and cultures. Also, highlight the relevant experience you have in terms of the job role.

Crafting great resumes is the key to getting your foot in the door, so make sure you do it right!

Practice Interview Questions

You can prepare for the interviews by practicing as many problems and questions as possible. While doing that, focus on the step-by-step approach you take to solve a given problem. At the interview, your approach will be more important to the interviewer than getting the right answer.

Practice Mock Interviews

You can prepare for the interview with a peer to get an idea of answering these questions with confidence during the interview. Their honest feedback will help you improve your people skills. A step up would be practicing with actual interviewers.

Interview Kickstart can help you with this. Our instructors are tech leads and hiring managers from FAANG and other tier-1 tech companies. Sign up for our free webinar to learn more.

Ask the Alums

Go to LinkedIn to reach out to employees working at Facebook. Ask them what questions they asked during the interview, what the culture is like, and what the interview process looks like. This will give you an insider opinion on what the recruiting manager looks for.

Facebook Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Practice, as we mentioned in the previous section, is crucial to crack an engineering manager interview at Facebook. Here, we have listed a few sample questions to help you prep:

Behavioral Questions for Facebook Engineer Manager Interview:

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Why do you want to join Facebook?
3. Tell me about the difficulties you had to face in a recent project and how you dealt with them.
4. There is an underperformer in your team; how would you handle the situation?
5. Tell me about the greatest accomplishment of your career
6. How would you deal with a conflict of interest among your colleagues?
7. If your teammates are having issues among themselves, how will you resolve them?
8. How would you take destructive criticism?
9. Have you ever had to take responsibility for your colleagues’ doings?
10. Tell me about a time you struggled on one of your software projects.

Recommended Reading: Behavioral Interview Questions for Software Developers

System and Product Design Interview Questions for Facebook Engineer Manager Interview:

1. How would you design Instagram or Instagram Reels?
2. How would you design Facebook NewsFeed?
3. How would you design Facebook's real-time comments and likes?
4. How would you design Facebook Messenger?
5. How would you design a shared text editor?
6. How would you design the type-ahead feature?
7. How would you design Twitter?
8. How would you design a system that can handle millions of card transactions every hour?
9. Design caching system
10. Design a database that can handle a million transactions per hour
11. Design Bit.ly

Recommended Reading: System Design Interview Preparation Tips

Coding Questions for Facebook Engineering Manager Interview:

Most of the coding interviews revolve around data structure and algorithms. Few practice questions are given below to brush up on your DSA skills before the interview

Arrays and Strings:

1. You are given an array of n integers where n is greater than 1; you have to return an output so that output[i] = product of all the array elements except the ith element.
2. How would you Implement the next permutation that rearranges numbers into the lexicographically next greater permutation of numbers?
3. You are given a non-empty string a; you can only delete at most one character. Will you be able to make it a palindrome?
4. You are given a string a and a string b; find the minimum window containing all the characters in b. The complexity should be complexity O(n).
5. Group the anagrams in an array of strings.
6. Suppose a string contains just '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', and determine whether the input string is valid.
7. You are given an array ‘a’ of ‘n’ integers. FInd if there are three elements x,y,z in ‘a’ such that x + y + z = 0.
8. Implement String search algorithm

Graphs and Trees:

1. You are given the root node of a Binary Search Tree(BST), you have to return the sum of all nodes with values between L and R. L and R will be inclusive.
2. If your iterator will be initialized with the root node of a Binary Search Tree, how will you Implement an iterator over it?
3. How will you determine the length of the diameter of a given binary tree?
4. How will you find the maximum path sum of a given binary tree?
5. How will you approach serializing and deserializing a binary tree?
6. You are given a sorted array of words (dictionary) in some unknown language; how will you find the order of characters in that language.
7. How will you determine whether a given graph is Bipartite or not?
8. You have to convert a given Binary Tree into a Circular Doubly Linked List.
9. How will you clone a directed graph?
10. Find the least common ancestor in a tree

Dynamic Programing:

1. You are given a list of positive numbers and a target integer x. You have to write a function to check whether the array has a continuous subarray of size at least 2 that sums up to the multiple of x. In other words, the subarray sums up to n*x, where n is also an integer.
2. Suppose you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on any given day i. You are only permitted to complete at most one transaction. Write an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Sorting and Searching:

1. You are given a sorted array of integers; you have to return the low and high index of the given key or return -1 if the indexes are not found.
2. You have to search for a given number in a sorted array that has been rotated by some arbitrary number. The array contains unique elements. Return -1 if the number does not exist in the array.

Other:

1. Add two numbers as a list.
2. Find unique paths in a grid.
3. Write an Algorithm for facebook refresh.
4. Determine the order of characters in a dictionary.
5. Find the nth number in the Fibonacci series.
6. Rotate a matrix.

For more coding problems with solutions, visit our Problems page.
To brush on DSA basics, visit our Learn page.

Tips for Facebook Engineering Manager Interview

Here are a few tips to help you perform well during the interview:

• Even if you are interviewing for a managerial role, you are still required to code well.
• You need to speak clearly and sensibly about the lifecycle of the product and project management. Your opinion on running projects is going to matter as an Engineering Manager.
• You also need to show off your EQ, as this job also involves people management. The interviewers will judge you on your soft skills as well. Like how you will uplift your team and how you can make the best out of them.
• Then for the technical round, you will have to think out loud because staying quiet and coming up with a solution in your head does not help convey your thought process.
• Take all the hints you are given. Keep calm and listen to the questions carefully.
• For system design interviews, practice by improving designs of the existing systems and write pointers on how they can be improved.

FAQs on Facebook Engineering Manager Interview

1. Is Facebook Engineering Manager a hands-on coding job?

At Facebook, the higher you go up, you are less likely to do hands-on coding. At the managerial level, 70% of your work will be people management. Leadership roles are most likely to start with management conversation rather than technical conversation. You will still be interviewed on your technical skills, but the interviewer might not deep dive into it.

2. What does a Facebook Engineering Manager do?

An engineering manager responds to 3 “customers.” First, you have to cater to the end-users, understand their requirements, and plan to implement the solution. Then he will have to keep his boss informed about his need for the resources. Third, he should accumulate a team of experts to get the job done.

3. What is the Facebook culture like?

Facebook’s culture is like a hacker culture. It wants its employees to push their limits and strive for improvement. After all, it is rated as the best workplace by its employees for some reason. According to Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook works on 5 core values: boldness, focus on impact, moving fast, being open, and building social value.

Crack Your Next Engineering Manager Interview

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