Did the Meta MLE loop for an E5 role on the Feed Ranking team. Going to be blunt about what matters and what's overrated in the prep guides.
The loop (E5 MLE): Recruiter screen Technical phone screen: either coding or ML design, varies by team Onsite: coding round x1, ML system design x1, ML depth/theory x1, Jedi behavioral x1
Some people report getting two coding rounds at onsite. I got one. It was a medium-difficulty array/hash map problem, nothing exotic. Don't neglect coding prep -- I've seen people fail MLE loops at Meta specifically because they treated coding as an afterthought.
ML system design: This is the main differentiator round. They'll give you a classic recommendation or ranking problem: design a feed ranking system, design a content moderation classifier, design an ads relevance model. The framework they want: Problem formulation: what are you optimizing for, what's the business objective, how do they connect Data: what training data, how do you get labels, imbalanced classes Features: what signals, how do you handle real-time features vs. batch Model choice and why: start simple (logistic regression), know when to go deeper (two-tower, transformer) Training: loss function, evaluation metrics (AUC, NDCG, precision@k) Serving: latency constraints, how you handle a 2-stage retrieval + ranking pipeline Monitoring: how you detect model drift, feedback loops
You don't need to be an ML research scientist. You need to be someone who can take a vague business problem and spec out an end-to-end ML pipeline that could plausibly ship.
ML theory round: Lighter than you'd expect. Questions I got: explain gradient descent, when would you use L1 vs L2 regularization, what's the bias-variance tradeoff in your own words. One question about attention mechanisms that was more conceptual than mathematical. No deriving backprop from scratch.
What I'd skip: Coding LeetCode hards. Not worth the time. A handful of mediums in relevant categories (arrays, hash maps, trees) is enough. Meta MLE loop isn't testing LC-hard competence the way some other companies do.
TC note (won't give exact numbers): E5 MLE comp at Meta is solid. RSUs are the story -- they refresh aggressively and the stock has been strong.