Facebook E5 Phone Screen: Two Coding Questions, Bay Area
Updated July 17, 2026
This account covers a Facebook phone screen for an E5 software engineering role, held in the Bay Area. The candidate had previously written up a separate virtual onsite experience for the same company and later added this post after readers asked about the earlier phone-screen stage. The call ran 45 minutes: a few minutes of mutual introductions, then two coding questions back to back, with the interviewer holding back roughly five minutes at the end for the candidate's own questions.
Both problems happened to be ones the candidate had already worked through beforehand, which let them open each with the optimal approach rather than talking through a slower one first. After stating and getting sign-off on the approach, they coded the solution in Java and walked the interviewer through it with examples. A recruiter call afterward relayed positive feedback from the hiring committee and said the team would move forward with an offer; compensation details were posted separately.
How the process went
Phone screen
45-minute call with a Facebook interviewer: introductions for the first few minutes, two coding questions for the bulk of the call, and time reserved at the end for the candidate's questions.
Onsite loop
The candidate went on to a virtual onsite round for the same E5 process, which they documented in a separate write-up rather than in this post.
Hiring committee review and offer
A recruiter called with positive feedback from the hiring committee and said the team would move forward with extending an offer; compensation specifics were shared in a separate compensation-discussion post.
Phone Screen
Two coding problems (string manipulation and interval merging) plus a short candidate Q&A · 45 minutes
- Add Binary — add two binary strings represented as text without using built-in base conversion
- Merge Intervals — merge a list of overlapping intervals
Add Binary took about 10-15 minutes including discussion of the approach and a walkthrough of the code.
Merge Intervals took about 20-25 minutes, again with the approach discussed before coding.
The interviewer used the closing minutes for the candidate to ask about the work the interviewer's team was doing.
Key takeaways
- Recognizing a question from prior practice let the candidate open with the optimal approach directly, instead of narrating a slower solution first.
- Working through recently company-tagged practice problems ahead of a screen can pay off — the candidate noted overlap between what they had studied and what was actually asked.
- With only 45 minutes for two problems, moving efficiently through a familiar question left more time to handle the second one within the same window.
- The interviewer set aside time specifically for the candidate's own questions — worth preparing one or two questions about the team's day-to-day work in advance.
- Feedback did not come immediately after the call; it arrived later through a recruiter follow-up referencing the hiring committee's decision, so some lag before next steps should be expected.
Practice a Facebook interview
Rehearse out loud against the kinds of questions in this story — with an AI interviewer that asks follow-ups.
Practice this interviewSource
The questions and process facts come from the candidate's public write-up, linked below. The retelling above is our own summary.
Candidate's public write-up on LeetCode Discuss