How to Prepare for Your Facebook Front-End Engineer Interview

Facebook is one of the most sought-after companies for front-end engineers to work at. However, landing a job at this tech giant can be quite challenging. At Facebook, candidates are evaluated relative to the other candidates, who have to answer the same set of questions. So, solving a problem won’t be enough. You have to solve it better than the rest. 

If you are preparing for a tech interview, check out our interview questions page and salary negotiation e-book to get interview-ready! Also, read Facebook Interview Process Guide for insights into Facebook’s tech interview process.

At Interview Kickstart, we have trained over 6,000 software engineers till now. Naturally, we know what it takes to crack the toughest tech interviews. Since 2014, Interview Kickstart alums have been offered lucrative job offers from FAANG and Tier-1 tech companies, with an average salary hike of 49%. The highest ever offer received by an IK alum is a staggering $933,000!

Here, we will provide you with the unique opportunity to learn from expert instructors who are hiring managers and tech leads at Google, Facebook, Apple, and other top Silicon Valley tech companies.

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Here’s what this blog will cover:

• What Do Front-End Engineers at Facebook Do?
• Must-know Front-end Concepts for Facebook Tech Interview Prep
• What’s the Front-End Engineer Interview Process at Facebook Like?
• Facebook Front-end Interview Questions
• 5 Key Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Front-End Engineer Interview Prep
• FAQs on Facebook Front-end Engineering Role

What Do Front-End Engineers at Facebook Do?

The core infrastructure of Facebook consists of several tools, programming languages, and services. At the front-end, Facebook servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

The job role of a front-end engineer at Facebook is quite similar to that of a software engineer. As a Facebook front-end engineer, you have to deal with coding servers and client-side and provide data analysis focusing on the front-end development aspects. 

You have to work on the UX and UI of the products in close collaboration with the design and development teams. It would be your responsibility to provide a consistent web experience across all browsers by introducing new UI-related features.

Must-know Front-end Concepts for Facebook Tech Interview Prep

If you want to become a front-end engineer at Facebook, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the major concepts you need to work on. 

Take a look to get a detailed idea about the various technical concepts that are essential for a Facebook front-end engineer.

HTML and CSS: Fundamental knowledge of HTML and CSS is necessary for any front-end engineer. Make sure to brush up on the following basic concepts:

1. Grid systems
2. Semantic markups
3. CSS sprites
4. CSS animations
5. Pseudo-classes

In addition, learning about CSS predecessors like SASS or LESS can be quite beneficial as well.

JavaScript: Most tech companies spend significant time assessing the JavaScript knowledge of their candidates. It’s the same for this FAANG company too. Questions will primarily focus on the concepts of:

1. Event loop
2. Event bubbling
3. Prototypal inheritance
4. Scoping
5. Callbacks and promises
6. Currying
7. Variable and function hoisting

Design Patterns: The following design patterns of JavaScript are important to learn about:

1. Factory
2. Decorator
3. Singleton
4. Facade
5. Revealing module
6. MVC, MVVM, MVP

In addition, a basic knowledge of JavaScript frameworks might come in handy during the interview.

What’s the Front-End Engineer Interview Process at Facebook Like?

The Facebook front-end engineer interview is usually not an easy one to crack. It runs for as long as two months and consists of the following stages:

• Referrals and applications
• Recruiter phone screen round
• Technical phone screen
• On-site interviews

Key Components of the Facebook Front-End Engineer Interview

To successfully crack all the rounds of a Facebook front-end engineer interview, you have to prepare for the major components of the interview process individually. 

Here are some of the essential components that the Facebook front-end engineer interview consists of:

Coding 

Coding interviews form a key phase of the interview process for hiring a front-end engineer at Facebook. You will have to appear for a coding interview during the technical phone screen round and two during the final on-site round.

Interviewers tend to ask questions mainly from HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Coding questions will mostly involve algorithms and data structures. As a candidate, you have to provide accurate, efficient, and bug-free codes, which are to be written on whiteboards. Make sure to talk your way through the entire problem-solving process.

Design and Architecture

As a front-end engineer at Facebook, your responsibility will be to design UIs that Facebook users are going to interact with worldwide. Thus, you should possess solid knowledge and understanding of browsers, APIs, DOM, and more. 

During the design and architecture interviews, you will face an open-ended question about designing the front-end architecture of a particular application. You have to be careful while answering this question. Be sure to discuss the pros and cons of different approaches that you’d use.

Behavioral

Apart from technical questions, you have to be prepared to face behavioral questions as well. Your recruiters will try to gauge your ability to communicate clearly, collaborate with others effectively, and build healthy working relationships. With behavioral questions, recruiters will have a better understanding of your personality.

As a front-end engineer at Facebook, you will have to work in different teams with analysts, developers, data scientists, designers, product managers, etc. Thus, you will need to show the recruiters that you can deal with complex situations that will test your perseverance, conflict resolution skills, empathy, and ability to deal with failures.

You can expect behavioral questions during the recruiter phone screen round and the on-site round.

Facebook Front-end Interview Questions

Like all other tech companies, Facebook has a giant set of interview questions that are updated regularly. Therefore, it is hard to predict what you would be asked in the interview rounds.

Besides researching other resources, we have compiled a list of probable questions by collating information from our existing alums working at Facebook. Take a look at the following section to get a clear understanding of what questions you might face at Facebook interviews:

Technical Interviews: Some examples of technical questions asked at Facebook front-end engineer interviews:

1. Discuss the concept of ES6 Promises to a 5-year-old.
2. State the benefits of using ES6 maps on objects.
3. How to design a poll widget?
4. Suppose you have 500 revisions of a program. Write a program that is going to find and return the FIRST bad revision.
5. Can you design a general-purpose typeahead component?
6. How to implement a particular newsfeed that has only posts of pictures and texts?
7. Can you design a Pinterest-like user interface?
8. Find the longest increasing subsequence in an array of integers.
9. Suppose you are provided with an array where the “I”th element is the price of a stock on day I. Find out the maximum profit through an algorithm.

Behavioral Interviews: Behavioral interviews are crucial to gauge your soft skills. These skills will determine whether you are a suitable fit for the company and the team. You can expect the following Facebook interview questions during the behavioral rounds:

1. Why Facebook?
2. Tell us about a project that you are proud of.
3. What have been your best collaborative experiences?
4. Tell us about an incident where you had to resolve a conflict. What course of action did you take? What were the consequences?
5. Tell us something about yourself.
6. What has been the biggest achievement in your career so far?
7. What, according to you, are some of the future challenges that Facebook might encounter?

For more Facebook interview questions, check out:

• Facebook Phone Screen Interview Questions
• Facebook Coding Interview Questions
• Facebook System Design Interview Questions
• Facebook Behavioral Interview Questions

5 Key Tips to Enhance Your Facebook Front-End Engineer Interview Prep

To crack the Facebook front-end engineer interview, make sure to go through the following tips:

Learn About the Company

The first thing that every candidate dreaming of landing a job at Facebook should do is have a clear idea about the company. Know about its vision, goals, core values, products, offerings, and how the company functions. It will help you to provide appropriate responses to certain behavioral questions. 

Also, don’t forget to learn about Facebook’s 5 core values: move fast, be bold, focus on the impact, build social values and be open.

Practice Algorithms and Data Structures on Whiteboards

A lot will depend on how efficiently you handle the technical rounds. You will be required to solve complex problems with the help of algorithms, data structures, and design on whiteboards. 

To ace the technical interviews, you need to have a clear concept of arrays, hash tables, lists, stacks, queues, graphs, sorts, searches, trees, traversals, review recursions, and more.

Practice With Your Peers

Solving problems is not enough. You have to talk your way through the entire process and make the interviewers understand your approach. 

You need to communicate to your interviewer what you are doing while you are working on the problem. Without proper practice, you might end up fumbling.

Therefore, it’s best to practice live coding interviews with your peers being the interviewers. This will remove the anxiety and awkwardness and help you to be more communicative during technical rounds.

Keep Examples Ready

Candidates often have to refer to past experiences and incidents to respond to behavioral questions. One of the best ways to nail behavioral rounds is to substantiate your answers with real-life examples. Moreover, try to avoid exaggerating or skipping details while narrating previous experiences.

Select a Proper Interview Spot

The first two rounds of the Facebook front-end engineer interview process are online. You should have a stable internet connection and strong cell reception to ensure the interview runs uninterruptedly. Make sure to settle in a place free from external interferences. Do remember to use headphones so that you can keep both hands free for coding. 

In addition to these, we have also provided some general tips to make the interview process a bit easier for you:

• Try to prevent making a generalized statement, especially while responding to a behavioral question.
• Make sure to be straightforward with your responses. Providing ambiguous answers will only reduce your chances of success.
• If you have any doubt, try to clarify that without any hesitation.

Nail Your Facebook Interview With Interview Kickstart

Interview Kickstart is a leader in the field of technical interview preparation. We have successfully trained thousands of engineers to secure their dream jobs at top tech companies. If you are looking for guidance to crack a front-end engineering interview at Facebook, register for a free webinar at Interview Kickstart.

Our Front-End Engineering Interview Masterclass is designed for front-end engineers like you to help you take your prep to the next level.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• A comprehensive curriculum
• Mock interviews with FAANG recruiters and tech leads
• Plenty of homework assistance, 1x1 help, and technical coaching
• Multiple feedback loops
• Resume and LinkedIn building, personal branding, and live workshops
• Salary negotiation

So, are you ready to ace your next Facebook interview? Join our FREE Webinar to know more.

FAQs on Facebook Front-end Engineering Role

1. What is the average salary of a Facebook front-end engineer?

According to Comparably, a Facebook front-end engineer earns around $148,000 per annum. The base salary is about $128,000 with a bonus of $20,000. 

2. How difficult is the front-end engineer interview at Facebook?

The technical rounds at Facebook front-end engineer interviews can be a bit challenging. However, with practice, dedication, time management, perseverance, and an overall plan, you can easily crack each round of these interviews.