u/michaelnovati replied ·
Yes, I helped roll out this interview type at Meta. I've also worked with a number of people at Meta in the past month and I have directly helped them with this interview type (from E4 to E6), so I know what I'm talking about.
So this is the "product" variant of Systems Design. They have two variants: "Product Architecture" and "Systems Design", as well as more variants for specializations like UIE, ML, iOS, etc....
It's a full stack systems design interview. The "Systems Design" variant is a super backend variation that requires experience with large scale systems to do well with. The "Product Architecture" variant is focusing on more full stack experience, and maybe a couple of areas you dive into.
The prompts are fairly similar all around, "design Instagram", "design a hotel booking system", etc... they prompts are somewhat irrelevant.
General advice is the following:
1. Start with clarifying questions and identifying key user scenarios
2. Draw a box diagram with all the main services you would need at a high level, kind of like a sketch that you'll come back to and flesh out.
3. When making a "decision" mention at least two ways of solving that problem. Even if one is better than the other, just talk about both and go with the "obvious" one. This is very important so you can think about different ways to solve a problem instead of one way.
4. Don't spew out an answer, the best interviews are "conversational" and have good back and forth. The more questions and the deeper you go, the better. It's expected you'll get to a point where you don't know anything - especially the more junior you are - and admit that when you get there.
I time box my replies so I don't go on forever, but hopefully that's a good start. Can answer specific questions you have.