Meta’s Interview Loop Structure: Team Matching and Staff Engineer Screens

Useful meditations if you're thinking of entering Meta's hiring process

🙋‍♂️ Hi there, I’m Austen, a former Senior Engineering Manager and Hiring Committee Chair at Meta where I did over 1,000 interviews and trained 100s of interviewers, setting interview structures and picking questions. Subscribe to Mastering the Behavioral Interview to get tips and resources on preparing for the most underrated SWE interview type.

Each company has their own unique hiring and interviewing process and knowing about those helps you better position yourself for a hire. Be on the lookout for future posts specifically on preparing for Meta behavioral interviews, but as I was writing those, there were some useful context and thoughts about Meta’s process that I thought would be better posted separately.

Meta's loop structure (i.e., the set of interviews given during candidacy) is based on previous Big Tech interview approaches and should be familiar to anyone who’s done any research on interview processes.

For E4 (mid-level) and E5 (senior) candidates, it looks like this:

• 1-2⨉ “phone screens” which are coding interviews before the onsite phase

• 2⨉ coding interviews

• 1⨉ system design interview

• 1⨉ behavioral interview

• N⨉ team matching conversations with hiring managers (after you’ve cleared the other rounds)

The loop structure for E6 candidates looks slightly different and it looks very different for E7+ candidates, which we wont discuss here. Here’s what to expect at E6:

• 1⨉ “Structured Screen” in lieu of the “phone screens,” which is a combination of behavioral questions and coding questions, designed to assess whether to interview you as an E5 or an E6.

• 2⨉ coding interviews

• 2⨉ system design interviews

  • For E6 candidates, the loop includes an additional system design interview reflecting the emphasis on longer-term thinking required in the advisory role of a senior engineer.

• 1⨉ behavioral interview

• N⨉ team matching conversations with hiring managers (after you’ve cleared the other rounds)

If you’re in one of these loops and you see additional interview rounds, they are likely either training interviews (typically at the end of your day or on a separate day) or perhaps follow up interviews. Read more about follow ups.

Preparing for the E6/Staff Engineer Structured Screen

To determine whether a candidate should be in the E4-E5, E6, or E7+ processes, which are all different loop structures with different interviewers, the phone screen for potential E6 candidates is replaced with what’s called a Structured Screen: half behavioral and half coding interview.

Since the expectation of E6 is having completed multiple, large-scale, complex projects with strong business impact, be sure to emphasize that early in your Structured Screen. Your “Tell Me About Yourself” response should convey your strongest accomplishments. Consider techniques like The Halo Effect to present a wide array of experience quickly.

Thoughts on the Team Matching Phase

Lately, Meta has been requiring engineers who pass their onsite rounds to go through a “team matching” phase, meeting multiple managers for the final team assignment. Since it’s relatively new to Meta’s hiring process and ends up being full of behavioral-type discussions, it’s worth saying a few things about it.

If you’re advanced to the team match phase the good news is that you’re very likely to be hired—you’ve cleared the highest hurdles. They will tell you this is not another interview and I suppose technically they are correct, however if a manager cannot be found that will take you on their team, your candidacy will eventually expire, though I’m not sure when.

Here’s how you can prepare for the team match phase and run through the tape to the finish line:

• Do your best to understand the team and the manager in advance. Is it an infrastructure team with an experienced Meta manager, a product team with a manager new to the company, a new developer experience team, etc.?

• Polish your response to “Tell Me About Yourself” and consider extending it a bit, expanding on your accomplishments and why you’re right for the team. This is less of an interview where the manager has a lot of questions to cover and more of a get to know you session, so extra time spent is not a problem.

• Make sure your resume presents your experience accurately and quickly. Add a summary at the top that’s relevant to Meta. Ask the recruiter to update your resume in the tool before it gets sent to the hiring managers.

• Be prepared for questions about how your experience aligns with the team.

• Prepare questions for the manager. Understand what makes you successful and what a great team for you might be then ask the manager about those aspects.

Accept the first team that accepts you
I generally don’t advise making fear-based decisions or following greedy-algorithm-style life advice, but the implicit assumption behind having the team matching phase at all is that open headcount is scarce.

So accept the first team that accepts you.

It seems like moving internally is still relatively easy, probably after 1-1.5 years, so go ahead and join the company somewhere and shift around later.

Stay on top of recruiting
It’s not clear to me how recruiters are currently incentivized during the team matching phase and how much support they’ll give you to ensure you find a team. As with everything else in life, advocate for yourself and stay in close contact with your recruiter.

Have you been through a Meta loop recently? What’s your advice?