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Meta's Product Architecture Interview: How to Prepare
By Evan King
May 1, 2024
I'm Evan. I spent 5 years as an interviewer and Staff Engineer at Meta and am now the co-founder of Hello Interview. I've helped hundreds of candidates prepare for upcoming Product Architecture interviews at Meta, an interview that, more than any other, leads to a ton of confusion and uncertainty.
In this guide, I am going to cut right to the chase to help you understand the best way to prepare for your upcoming Meta Product Architecture interview. Importantly, at the end, I categorize common Product Architecture problems into 10 main categories. If you are familiar with how to solve a single problem from each of these categories, you should be well prepared for the Product Architecture interview.
What is the Meta Product Architecture Interview?
The Product Architecture interview is the System Design equivalent for Product Software Engineers (SWE, Product). It is a 45-minute interview where you will be asked to design a user-facing product by defining the requirements, architecting the APIs, and drawing a high-level system diagram. "User-facing" is the key term here. This means it's questions like "Design Facebook's news feed" or "Design Ticketmaster" and not "Design a distributed cache" or "Design a load balancer". You should be able to design the entire system with mostly AWS (or equivalent) components.
How to Prepare for the Meta Product Architecture Interview
First, I am going to assume you have some of the basics. You know about API design, you know about databases and their schemas, and you have familiarity with common AWS services. If you don't, you should start there and then come back to this guide.
The path to success includes 3 key steps:
- Delivery: Get familiar with a delivery framework that servers as a structured approach to solving Product Architecture problems and helps you manage your time effectively.
- Core Concepts & Technologies: Review core system design concepts and technologies.
- Practice by Category: Practice by systematically attacking problems grouped by common patterns and themes.
- Mock Interviews: Put your skills to the test with mock interviews to get a feel for the real thing.
Step 1: Get familiar with a delivery framework
A delivery framework is a structured approach to solving Product Architecture problems. It helps you manage your time effectively and ensures you cover all the necessary components of a system design. You only get 35 minutes to solve the problem because the 5 minutes on either side are for introductions and questions.
The framework that I have found to be most effective is documented in detail in the Hello Interview Delivery Framework. I've seen a lot of candidates take a lot of different approaches, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. That said, in my experience, this framework offers the perfect balance of structure and flexibility and has been the most successful for candidates I've worked with.
Recommended product architecture interview framework
Step 2: Review core system design concepts and technologies
There is a relatively limited set of concepts and technologies that you need to be familiar with to succeed in the Product Architecture interview. Concepts include things like Consistency, locking, indexing, security, etc. You can find a high level overview of each of these concepts in our Core Concepts Breakdown. That guide may not get you all the way there, but it's a damn good place to start. Give it a read, identify the concepts you feel less familiar with, and then go do some more research on Google, YouTube or with ChatGPT.
Communication Protocols Example
Same story with technologies. You should be familiar with the most common services like blob storage, queues, streams, caches, CDNs, etc. You can get the high level breakdown for each of these in our Key Technologies Breakdown. Take the same approach here, plot the landscape, identify your weak spots, and then go do some additional research to fill the gaps.
Queues Example
Step 3: Practice by category
This is the important part, and really what prompted me to write this guide. In the same way that you can categorize Leetcode-style problems into logical groups based on the underlying patterns and algorithms, you can do the same with Product Architecture problems.
I took the time to categorize common Product Architecture problems into 10 main categories. The key concepts, technologies, and patterns used to solve one problem from a category are often the same as those used to solve another problem from the same category. If you are familiar with how to solve a single problem from each of these categories, you should be well prepared for the Product Architecture interview.
- Online Ticketing Systems: Addressing consistency and concurrency in high-demand ticket sales
- Example Questions: Ticketmaster, Booking.com, Airbnb
- Key Concepts: Consistency models, locking, indexing
- Streaming Services: Design challenges related to real-time data streaming and content delivery
- Example Questions: YouTube, Netflix, Spotify
- Key Concepts: Streaming protocols like HLS and MPEG-DASH, CDNs, Chunking
- Location-Based Services: Designing for location tracking and geo-based recommendations
- Example Questions: Uber, Yelp, Find-My-Friends
- Key Concepts: Geospatial indexing, caching, sharding
- E-commerce Platforms: Scalability and transaction management for online shopping
- Example Questions: GoPuff, Amazon, eBay
- Key Concepts: Inventory management, transaction consistency, sharding
- Social Networks: Handling data scalability, real-time updates, and network effects
- Example Questions: NewsFeed, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Key Concepts: Celebrity problem (hot shards), fan-out-on-write vs. fan-out-on-read
- Messaging Platforms: Real-time messaging, notifications, and chat systems
- Example Questions: FB Live Comment, WhatsApp, Slack, Messenger
- Key Concepts: Pub/Sub, WebSockets, message queues
- Online Banking and Financial Services: Ensuring security, privacy, and transaction consistency
- Example Questions: PayPal, Venmo, online banking portals
- Key Concepts: Security protocols, encryption, auditing, consitency
- Collaborative Editing Tools: Concurrency and conflict resolution in real-time document editing
- Example Questions: Google Docs, note-taking apps
- Key Concepts: Operational Transformation, CRDTs, conflict resolution strategies
- Cloud Storage Services: Efficient and scalable file storage and sharing solutions
- Example Questions: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box
- Key Concepts: Blob storage, chunking, synchronization, fingerprinting
- Online Competition Platforms: Real-time interaction, leaderboard management, and competition handling
- Example Questions: LeetCode, online chess
- Key Concepts: Leaderboard management, real-time updates, sharding
With the categories outlined, you can now systematically tackle problems grouped by common patterns and themes. Here is how I recommend you approach this:
- Pick a category: Start with the category that you feel least comfortable with.
- Solve a problem: Find a problem from that category and solve it. Ideally, you'd choose a problem from this list since there are answer keys included. This means going over to Excalidraw (which is what is used in the Meta interview), starting a 35-minute timer, following the Delivery Framework recommended above, and solving the problem.
- Self-Assessment: After the 35 minutes are up, you should know exactly where you got tripped up. For each of the areas where you felt less comfortable, open up ChatGPT or Google and fill your knowledge gaps.
- Review the Answer Keys: Once you've finished the unguided learning, head back over to our Common Problem Breakdowns and review the solution. The solution should click given you just struggled through the problem yourself. If you chose a question that we have not written a solution for just yet, then use YouTube or Google to find a solution online and compare it to your own.
Step 4: Mock Interviews
Look, I admit, I am biased. I run a mock interview site after all. But what that also means is that I work with candidates every single day and hear time and time again just how valuable mock interviews are. They give you a feel for the real thing, they help you get comfortable with the format, and they give you a chance to practice your delivery framework in a high-pressure environment with a real Meta or FAANG interviewer on the other end.
If you are interested in trying a mock interview, you can book one with me or one of my colleagues at Hello Interview. We have a team of former Meta and FAANG engineers who have been in your shoes and know exactly what it takes to succeed in the Product Architecture interview having helped hundreds of candidates pass the Meta on-site in recent months.
You Got This!
I hope this guide has been helpful. I know the Meta Product Architecture interview can be a bit of a black box, but I promise you that with the right preparation you can absolutely crush it. Good luck!
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About The Author
Evan, Co-founder of Hello Interview and former Staff engineer at Meta, possesses a unique vantage point having been on both sides of the tech hiring process. With a track record of conducting hundreds of interviews and securing offers from top tech companies himself, he is now on a mission to help others do the same.
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