A friend got a Meta recruiter ping last month and immediately texted me "what do I even do now." I'd been through the loop, so I wrote her a long reply. This is basically that reply, cleaned up.
The first thing worth saying is that Meta's process is predictable, and that's good news. Once you know the shape of it, most of the panic goes away and you can spend your energy on the parts that actually move the needle.
It starts with a recruiter call, usually around half an hour. Low pressure. They want your background, what you're looking for, and roughly where you'd fit. Be honest about your timeline here, because it sets the pace for everything after.
Then comes the technical phone screen, about 45 minutes in a shared editor like CoderPad, with one or two coding problems. The mistake people make is treating it like a silent LeetCode session. The interviewer is listening to how you think, so narrate. Talk through your approach before you write, mention the edge cases you're weighing, say it out loud when you spot a better time complexity. A correct answer delivered in silence scores worse than a slightly slower one they can actually follow.
If that goes well, you get the onsite, or the "full loop." It's usually four to five rounds, and Meta has these internal nicknames you'll hear people throw around.
