Introduction#
Meta's coding interview is the most predictable in big tech, and that is genuinely good news: the pattern families are stable, well-documented, and finite. ShowOffer's Meta bank holds 258 coding questions, and nearly all of them fall into about ten families.
The hard part is not the problems. It is the clock. Two problems in 45 minutes means roughly 18 to 20 minutes each including discussion — so the skill being tested is reliable delivery at pace, not peak insight.
This post maps the families, links practice problems for each, and covers the separate set of questions aimed at the AI-enabled coding round.
Question families from our own Meta bank, grouped by pattern. We are not reproducing anyone's problem list or claiming Meta publishes one. Round composition varies by level and role family — confirm yours with your recruiter.
The Pattern Map#
1. Trees and Traversal#
The largest family. If you have limited time, start here.
How to practice these: get both the recursive and iterative forms of level-order traversal to muscle memory. A large share of this family is a variation on BFS with a twist — alternating direction, level grouping, sibling pointers — and if the base traversal costs you five minutes, the twist costs you the round.
2. Linked Lists#
A Meta signature. Mechanical once drilled, costly when not.
How to practice these: use a dummy head every time, and say out loud which pointers you are about to reassign before you type. Pointer-order mistakes are the most common avoidable bug in this family, and narrating prevents most of them.
3. Arrays, Two Pointers, and Hashing#
Expected to be fast. These are often the first of the two problems, and finishing one in eight minutes is what buys you room on the second.
4. Strings and Palindromes#
Frequent, and the family where candidates most often write more code than the problem requires.
5. Graphs, Grids, BFS and DFS#
- Escape the Building MazeMedium
How to practice these: have one BFS template and one DFS template you can write without thinking, including the visited-set handling. Grid problems are overwhelmingly a template plus a condition.
6. Intervals and Scheduling#
7. Heaps and Running Statistics#
8. Binary Search#
How to practice these: pick one boundary convention and never deviate from it. Off-by-one errors under a 20-minute clock are a pace killer, and consistency is the only real defense.
9. Dynamic Programming#
Present, but rarely the hardest variants. Do not let this family eat your whole preparation.
10. Design and Parsing#
Where Meta's coding round edges toward structure rather than algorithms.
The AI-Enabled Coding Round#
Meta has been reported as piloting an AI-enabled coding round since late 2025 — an invite-only format, roughly 60 minutes, in a specialized CoderPad environment with an assistant available inside it. Where it applies, it replaces one of the two traditional coding rounds.
ShowOffer has a separate set of questions built for this format:
How to practice these: the evaluated skill changes. You are not being measured on unaided recall but on whether you are a good engineer with an assistant — prompting with the real constraints, reading output critically, catching its mistakes, testing it, and staying the author of the solution.
The two failure directions are symmetric. Writing everything by hand wastes a round designed to observe your tool use. Accepting generated code unread leaves you unable to defend a solution you do not understand. Narrated selectivity is what scores: delegate the mechanical part, reason about the hard part yourself, say why as you go.
Reports describe this format as a limited, invite-only pilot — some candidates get it, some go through the classic no-AI format entirely. These require different preparation. Ask your recruiter explicitly.
A Three-Week Practice Plan#
Practice in pairs under a hard 45-minute total timer, spoken aloud. If you cannot state an approach in 3 minutes and have code running by minute 12, you will not finish two problems — and no amount of extra problem volume fixes a pace problem.
FAQ#
How many problems should I do to prepare for Meta?#
Fewer than most people attempt, practiced better. Meta's families are finite — the ten above cover nearly all 258 questions in this bank. Once you have a working template per family, additional volume returns less than timed pair practice.
What is the most important family?#
Trees and traversal, by question count, followed by linked lists. If you had one week, you would spend it on those two plus timed pairs.
Will I get the AI-enabled round?#
Possibly not. Public reports describe it as invite-only and part of a limited pilot. Ask your recruiter which format your loop uses rather than assuming either way.
Can I use AI in the classic coding round?#
No. The classic format is explicitly without AI assistance. Only the AI-enabled round permits it, and only within the provided environment.
Does strong coding protect my level?#
Not on its own. Reports consistently describe behavioral performance moving candidates from E5 to E4 independent of technical results. Budget real preparation for scope stories, not just code.
Are these the exact questions Meta will ask?#
No. They are practice problems in the families Meta's rounds draw from, and the value is in the pattern coverage rather than in specific problems.