Professional Presence & Personal Development Topics
Behavioral and professional development topics including executive presence, credibility building, personal resilience, continuous learning, and professional evolution. Covers how candidates present themselves, build trust with stakeholders, handle setbacks, demonstrate passion, and continuously evolve their leadership and technical approach. Includes media relations, thought leadership, personal branding, and self-awareness/reflective practice.
Staying Calm and Solution Focused Under Pressure
When presented with a crisis scenario (major bug discovered, key team member leaves, deadline suddenly accelerated), demonstrate your ability to stay composed, think through options, and focus on solutions. Show resilience and rational problem-solving.
Ownership and Attention to Detail
Candidates should be prepared to demonstrate how they take ownership of tasks and outcomes, follow established procedures, and prioritize accuracy in critical database work. Interviewers assess processes for double checking changes, pre deployment validation, rollback planning, impact analysis on users, risk mitigation steps, and how candidates institutionalize safeguards such as checklists and runbooks. Provide concrete examples showing how attention to detail prevented incidents, how you balanced speed with correctness, and how you ensured accountability and handoffs.
Problem Solving Behaviors and Decision Making
Covers the interpersonal and cognitive traits that shape how a candidate solves problems, including initiative, ownership, proactivity, resilience, creativity, continuous learning, and evaluating trade offs. Interviewers probe when a candidate takes initiative versus seeks help, how they balance speed versus quality, how they persist through setbacks, how they generate creative alternatives, and how they learn from outcomes. This topic assesses mindset, judgment, and the ability to make principled decisions under uncertainty.
Site Reliability Engineering Motivation
Prepare a concise, personal narrative explaining why you are interested in site reliability engineering specifically and why this particular role and company appeal to you. Cover what aspects of reliability engineering excite you such as building resilient systems, automating operations, incident response, capacity planning, observability, and reliability culture. Explain how your background prepared you for this work by citing relevant projects, troubleshooting or debugging experiences, internships, infrastructure or backend work, tools and technologies you used, and concrete incidents you helped resolve. For senior or staff level candidates, describe your vision for reliability engineering, specific technical challenges you want to tackle, how you would influence reliability practices, and how this role fits your career trajectory. For entry level candidates, be authentic about current skills and emphasize learning mindset and relevant coursework or hands on practice. Demonstrate knowledge of the company by referencing its technology, known infrastructure challenges, or reliability initiatives and align your motivations and goals with the team mission and role expectations.
Role Team and Company Understanding
Covers researching and demonstrating practical knowledge of the company the hiring team and the specific role. Candidates should be able to describe team mission and composition reporting relationships typical day to day responsibilities success metrics and short term priorities. This topic includes preparing substantive questions about onboarding expectations the first ninety days common technical and product challenges and how the role contributes to company objectives. Interviewers evaluate preparedness the candidate's ability to map their skills to concrete team needs and to propose realistic early contributions and measurable goals.
Interview Questions and Engagement
Focuses on how candidates prepare and use questions to demonstrate interest evaluate the opportunity and engage interviewers. Topics include preparing role and team specific questions, tailoring questions to the interviewer's perspective, sequencing follow ups, demonstrating research and strategic thinking, mutual evaluation techniques, communicating with the hiring manager, avoiding poorly informed questions, and using questions to clarify expectations and success metrics. Interviewers assess the quality of questions for domain knowledge critical thinking and cultural fit.
Ownership and Reliability
Demonstrating personal ownership and accountability for reliability outcomes. Interviewers look for examples of taking responsibility for tasks such as database administration or production runbooks, following through on incidents to resolution, proactively communicating status and risks, owning operational improvements, and going beyond minimal requirements to ensure reliability. This topic focuses on behavioral examples, communication, and demonstrated follow through.
AI Engineering Motivation and Role Fit
Evaluate why the candidate wants to work in AI engineering and how that interest connects to the specific companys AI vision and the open role. Topics include preferred AI subfields, types of problems that excite the candidate, relevant past projects, and how their technical interests and ethics align with the companys AI initiatives or research directions. Candidates should explain why AI work matters to them, which applications or models they care about, and how their experience would help solve the companys AI challenges in a way that feels authentic rather than rehearsed.
Motivation for Meta's Mission
Explores why a candidate wants to work at Meta, how their personal and professional motivations align with Meta's mission and values, and how they would contribute to Meta's goals. Addresses authenticity, long-term alignment, passion for the product and impact, cultural fit, and the ability to articulate a compelling narrative.