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StackCV®
If you are preparing for onsite loop interviews at Meta, particularly for senior roles such as E5 or M1 and above, it is highly likely that you will also be required to participate in a product architecture interview.
A common question though is, how is the product architecture interview at Meta different than a system design interview?
Systems Design: The Systems Design interview is more focused on distributed systems, scalability, performance and efficiency.
Product Architectural Design: The Product Architectural Design interview is more focused on API design, usability and utility.
According to the Meta interview guide, a Product Architecture Interview emphasizes the design of user-facing systems. This includes focusing on API design, usability, and overall system utility.
In a system design interview, the focus should be on scalability from the outset. For example, a globally used application like Facebook operates at a meta-level scale, requiring a deep understanding of both functional requirements and non-functional requirements such as availability, scalability, and performance. Additionally, it is important to perform back-of-the-envelope estimations to gauge the system’s capabilities.
The key question is: How can the system design handle large-scale usage while ensuring high availability, data consistency, and fault tolerance? This involves considering how web servers will be distributed and load balanced, as well as how data will be stored, partitioned, and sharded. Typically, system design interviews emphasize the backend services and scalability aspects.
In contrast, a product architecture interview focuses on the user-facing elements of the design. This includes specifying how user-facing features will be structured, defining the API contracts used by the user interface, and determining how the system will support more complex user interactions. It's also essential to consider how the user experience will vary across different types of devices. This interview requires a broader view, often referred to as full-stack system design.
Examples of Product Architecture Questions: - Design a feature to allow users to edit existing posts. - Add a feature to block users from appearing on a user's timeline. - Design a system for managing friend lists
In these types of product architecture interviews, the focus shifts from the scalability of backend services to the details of API design contracts and how users will interact with the system. Key considerations include the end-to-end implementation of these features and how they will enhance the user experience.
It's acceptable to delay scalability concerns and instead focus on how the feature will be implemented and the impact on the user's interaction with the system.