These questions are based on real interview experiences from candidates who interviewed at this company. You can practice answering them interactively on Dataford to better prepare for your interview.

Preparation for Meta is distinct because the company values engineering prowess as much as security knowledge. You should approach this process ready to demonstrate that you can code, design systems, and communicate complex risks to non-security stakeholders.

Role-Related Knowledge – Security at Meta operates at an unprecedented scale. You need a foundational understanding of attacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), as well as defense mechanisms. Whether your focus is infrastructure or application security, you must demonstrate deep technical fluency in your domain (e.g., OWASP Top 10, cloud security architecture, cryptography basics).

Problem-Solving Ability – Interviewers are looking for structured thinking. When presented with an open-ended security challenge, can you break it down? You are evaluated on your ability to identify the most critical risks first, propose scalable solutions, and weigh the trade-offs between security, performance, and usability.

Coding Proficiency – Unlike security roles at many other organizations, Meta expects Security Engineers to code. You will likely face a coding round similar to software engineering candidates, though often with a practical security context (e.g., parsing logs, automating a defense). You must be comfortable in languages like Python, C++, or Go.

Collaboration and Influence – This is a key cultural value. You will often need to convince product teams to prioritize security fixes. Evaluation focuses on how you handle conflict, how you mentor others, and how you drive consensus without slowing down the "Move Fast" culture.

The interview process for a Security Engineer at Meta is rigorous and designed to test both your breadth of knowledge and your depth of technical skill. It typically begins with a recruiter discussion to align on your background and interests, followed by a technical screening. This screening is usually a video call involving coding tasks or security trivia to ensure you meet the baseline technical requirements.

Upon passing the screen, you will move to the "onsite" loop (currently virtual). This loop consists of 4–5 separate interviews, each lasting about 45–60 minutes. You will meet with potential peers and cross-functional partners. The loop is structured to cover specific pillars: Coding, Security Architecture/System Design, Domain Knowledge, and Behavioral (often referred to as the "Jedi" or "people" interview).

Meta’s philosophy emphasizes "structured interviewing," meaning each interviewer has a specific signal they are trying to gather. This ensures fairness and reduces bias. You should expect a fast-paced environment; if a position is open, the team is eager to fill it, but they will not lower the bar on engineering quality.

The timeline above illustrates the standard progression from your first contact to the final decision. Use this to plan your study schedule—dedicate the early phase to refreshing core coding skills and the later phase to practicing system design and behavioral stories. Note that the "onsite" stage is a marathon; ensure you have the mental stamina for back-to-back problem solving.

To succeed, you must prepare for specific technical and behavioral competencies. Based on candidate reports, the following areas are heavily weighted.

Coding and Scripting

You will be expected to write functional, clean code. This is not just about algorithmic puzzles; it is about automation and tool building.

Be ready to go over:

• Data Structure Manipulation – Using hashmaps, lists, and strings to process information efficiently.
• Log Analysis – Writing scripts to parse large datasets (e.g., web server logs) to identify anomalies or attack patterns.
• Automation – creating scripts that could theoretically run in a production environment to mitigate a threat.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a function to parse a log file and identify the top 5 IP addresses generating 404 errors."
• "Given a list of file paths, write a script to identify potential directory traversal attempts."
• "Implement a simple rate-limiter algorithm."

Security Architecture and Design

This round tests your ability to secure complex systems. You will be asked to design a security solution for a hypothetical product or feature.

Be ready to go over:

• Cloud Security – Securing infrastructure in AWS/GCP or internal clouds, including IAM, network segmentation, and secrets management.
• Authentication & Authorization – OAuth, SAML, OIDC, and how to handle session management at scale.
• Threat Modeling – Identifying trust boundaries, data flows, and potential attack vectors in a distributed system.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a secure photo-sharing service. How do you handle access control for private vs. public photos?"
• "How would you architect a system to securely store and retrieve user passwords?"
• "We are building a new internal tool for HR. Walk me through the security architecture you would propose."

Application Security and Privacy

For roles focused on product security, this is the core evaluation. You must show you understand how applications break and how to fix them.

Be ready to go over:

• Web Vulnerabilities – Deep understanding of XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection, SSRF, and RCE.
• Remediation – It is not enough to find the bug; you must know how to fix it in code and how to prevent it systematically (e.g., using secure frameworks).
• Privacy Engineering – Understanding data minimization, anonymization techniques, and ensuring compliance with privacy standards.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "I see a vulnerability in this code snippet. Explain what it is, how to exploit it, and how you would rewrite the code to fix it."
• "How would you prevent a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attack on a state-changing API endpoint?"
• "Review this Python function for security flaws."

Behavioral and Culture (The "Jedi" Round)

Meta places high importance on how you work. This interview assesses your ability to navigate ambiguity, manage conflict, and drive impact.

Be ready to go over:

• Conflict Resolution – Times you disagreed with a manager or an engineer and how you resolved it.
• Impact – Projects where you took initiative and delivered measurable results.
• Learning – How you handle failure and what you learned from a specific mistake.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you found a significant security flaw. How did you handle the disclosure and remediation?"
• "Describe a situation where you had to convince a product manager to delay a launch due to security concerns."
• "Tell me about a time you made a mistake that impacted a project."

As a Security Engineer at Meta, your day-to-day work is dynamic and highly collaborative. You are rarely working in isolation; instead, you are embedded within the broader engineering ecosystem.

Building Security Infrastructure A significant portion of your time is spent designing and implementing tools. This might involve building AI-driven systems to detect abuse, creating frameworks that automatically sanitize user input, or developing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) modules that ensure all new cloud deployments are secure by default. You are expected to prototype rapidly and iterate based on real-world data.

Incident Response and Consulting You will act as a subject matter expert for engineering teams. This involves performing security reviews on new features, triaging incoming bug bounty reports, and leading incident response efforts when threats are detected. You will investigate root causes of privacy or security incidents and drive the remediation process, ensuring that the same class of vulnerability does not reoccur.

Cross-Functional Collaboration You will partner with Software Engineers, Data Scientists, and Product Managers. Your goal is to enable them to move fast without breaking things. This requires translating complex security risks into business terms and helping teams adopt "secure-by-design" principles. You may also be involved in mentoring junior engineers and contributing to the external security community through research or open-source projects.