What level is Senior Data Engineer at Meta?

At Meta, Senior Data Engineer corresponds to the IC5 level. The bar emphasizes independent technical leadership and cross-team influence without people-management responsibilities.

How much does a Meta Senior Data Engineer in New York make?

Total compensation for Meta Senior Data Engineer in New York ranges $215K–$260K base • $420K–$620K total (IC5). Ranges shift by team and negotiation.

Does Meta actually hire data engineers in New York?

Yes, Meta maintains a New York office and hires Senior Data Engineer data engineers there. Team assignment may be office-locked or global; confirm with the recruiter before the loop.

How long should I prepare for the Meta Senior Data Engineer interview?

Most working DEs find 8-10 weeks is about right. The technical prep scales with experience; the behavioral story bank is where candidates underestimate time.

Does Meta interview data engineers differently than software engineers?

Yes, the DE track at Meta emphasizes SQL depth, warehouse and pipeline design, and real production data experience (late data, backfills, quality checks), which generalist SWE loops don't test.

Interview Guide

Meta Senior Data Engineer Interview in New York (IC5)

Q: How is the Senior Data Engineer loop different from other levels at Meta?

The format of the loop matches other levels; difficulty and evaluation shift to independent technical leadership and cross-team influence, and questions at this level dig into independent system design and cross-team influence.

Meta (IC5) Senior Data Engineer loop: SQL-heavy with fast-paced coding expectations and a product-sense orientation. Bar at this level: independent technical leadership and cross-team influence. Typical 5-8 years of data engineering experience. Details on the New York office (New York, NY) follow, including compensation calibrated to the local market.

Compensation

$215K–$260K base • $420K–$620K total (IC5)

Loop duration

4.8 hours onsite

Rounds

6 rounds

Location

New York, NY

Practice problems

Meta senior data engineer practice set

4 problems

Interview problems predicted for Meta senior data engineers based on their actual job descriptions. Click any problem to work it in a live coding environment.

SQLmedium~5 min

Smooth Latency

Your team is investigating whether certain API endpoints are getting slower over time. For every row in api_calls where latency is not NULL, compute a running average of latency partitioned by endpoint and ordered by call_time, covering all calls up to and including the current one. Return endpoint, latency, and running_avg.

Open in practice environment→

Pythoneasy~10 min

Letters in the Noise

A text-cleaning step in your pipeline needs a per-letter tally of the raw strings flowing through it. For a given `s`, return how many times each letter appears, treating uppercase and lowercase as the same letter and ignoring any character that is not a letter. Give the results as `[letter, count]` pairs in lowercase, ordered alphabetically.

Open in practice environment→

Modelingmedium~35 min

Two Wallets

We run an online education marketplace with two user types: students paying for access, and instructors paying for listing and promotion features. Both can subscribe to different plan tiers using multiple saved payment methods. Design the data model, then write the SQL for month-over-month subscription growth.

Open in practice environment→

SQLmedium~10 min

Subscribers Without Premium

Pull basic-plan subscribers who never upgraded to premium from the subscriptions data. The retention team wants to run a winback campaign targeting this group.

Open in practice environment→

Rolling 7-day active users

Count distinct users active in the trailing 7 days for each date. Product analytics staple.

1	WITH dates AS (
2	SELECT DISTINCT
3	activity_date
4	FROM activity
5	)
6
7	SELECT
8	d.activity_date AS day,
9	COUNT(DISTINCT a.user_id) AS rolling_7d_users
10	FROM dates AS d
11	INNER JOIN activity AS a
12	ON a.activity_date <= d.activity_date
13	AND JULIANDAY(d.activity_date) - JULIANDAY(
14	a.activity_date
15	) < 7
16	GROUP BY d.activity_date
17	ORDER BY d.activity_date

Prepare for the interview

01 / Open invite

02min.

Walk into Meta knowing the system design pattern they'll test.

a Meta system design query, the same shape a screen would give you.

The diff against expected. Where ties broke. What you missed.

sandbox

1source → bronze → silver → gold

2 ingest : CDC + Kafka

3 transform : dbt + Airflow

4 serve : Snowflake

Execute your solution0.4s avg.

MetaInterview question

Solve a Meta problem

New York, NY

Meta in New York

Finance-adjacent DE work is common; fintech and trading firms compete with Big Tech on comp. Required comp range disclosures in NY job postings.

Offers in New York use the same reference compensation band; no local adjustment applies. The New York office's interview loop mirrors the global loop structure; team assignment and comp-band negotiation are the main local variables.

Prepare for the interview

03 / From the bank03 of many

03hand-picked.

The Identity Problem

Hard10 min

Old systems. New demands. The same customer appears under three different names.

Open the sandbox

Pick your level

MetaL3The Analyst Who Saw the Salary Data SalesforceL4Nested Docs, Flat Reports AdobeL5The Fleet That Never Stops

Pulled from debriefs where system design separated levels.

The loop

How the interview actually runs

01Recruiter screen

30 min

Non-technical. The recruiter confirms level, product area (Ads, Integrity, Instagram, Reality Labs), and motivations. How you describe past work signals IC3/IC4/IC5.

→Quantify everything: row counts, daily event volumes, TB processed
→Research the specific team. Meta has dozens of DE teams with different tech stacks
→Ask whether the loop includes a Python round; some teams do, some don't

02Technical phone screen

45 min

Live SQL coding, 1-2 problems, in a shared doc with no syntax highlighting. Problems emphasize window functions, multi-step logic, and event-stream schemas.

→Think out loud from the start, silence worries the interviewer
→Expect window functions: ROW_NUMBER, LAG, LEAD, running totals
→Ask clarifying questions: NULL handling, duplicates, timezone of timestamps

03Onsite: SQL deep-dive

45 min

2-3 SQL problems with increasing complexity. The last often adds an optimization discussion: 'Your solution works, now make it efficient on 500B rows.'

→Practice writing SQL without autocomplete. Meta uses a shared doc
→When discussing optimization, mention partition pruning, predicate pushdown
→Use CTEs to break complex queries into readable steps

04Onsite: Python / data manipulation

45 min

Practical data work, not LeetCode. Parse JSON logs, transform nested structures, write a data validation function, build a small ETL step.

→Practice file I/O, dictionary manipulation, list comprehensions
→Write helper functions instead of one monolithic block
→Handle edge cases explicitly, empty inputs, missing keys, malformed data

05System design (pipeline architecture)

60 min

Design a production pipeline end-to-end: ingestion, transformation, storage, consumers, SLAs, failure modes, backfill strategy, and cost trade-offs. At senior level, you drive the conversation without prompting. Expect follow-ups about scale, cross-team coordination, and operational load.

→Anchor on the SLA and data shape before diagramming
→Discuss idempotency, partitioning, and backfill explicitly
→Estimate cost: 'This pipeline will cost roughly $X/month at this volume'

Level bar

What Meta expects at Senior Data Engineer

Independent technical leadership

Senior DEs drive pipeline designs without engineering manager involvement. Interviewers probe whether you can decompose ambiguous requirements, make architecture trade-offs, and defend your choices under scrutiny.

Cross-team coordination

Senior scope regularly spans multiple teams. Expect scenarios about a downstream team missing an SLA because of a change you made, or negotiating a schema migration with the team that owns the upstream source.

Production operational rigor

Fluent in on-call, alerting, data quality checks, and incident response. Dive-deep stories at this level should include correlating a metric drop to a specific commit or a timezone bug or a subtle ordering issue, not 'I looked at the logs.'

Meta-specific emphasis

Meta's loop is characterized by: SQL-heavy with fast-paced coding expectations and a product-sense orientation. Calibrate your preparation to that, generic FAANG prep will not close the gap on company-specific expectations.

Behavioral

How Meta frames behavioral rounds

Move Fast

Meta's culture rewards shipping and iterating. Stories about shipping a V1, measuring, and iterating land harder than stories about getting a design perfect before launch.

“Tell me about a time you shipped something before it was ready.”

Focus on Long-Term Impact

Paired with Move Fast. Meta wants DEs who ship fast without creating 3-year tech debt. Balance matters.

“Describe a decision where you chose long-term quality over short-term velocity.”

Build Awesome Things

Meta wants people who care deeply about craft. Your ETL pipeline is not just a job, it is a thing you built.

“What's a data system you've built that you're proud of?”

Live in the Future

Senior and above: betting on the technology curve. Candidates who talk about where data infrastructure is going in 3 years land strongly.

“How do you expect data engineering to change in the next 3 years?”

Prep timeline

Week-by-week preparation plan

8-10 weeks out

Foundations and gap analysis

·Do 10 medium SQL problems. Note which patterns feel slow
·Write out 2-3 behavioral stories per value, Meta weights this round heavily
·Read Meta's public engineering blog for recent architecture patterns
·Review your prior production work, pick 3-5 projects you can discuss in depth

6 weeks out

SQL and coding fluency

·Practice window functions until DENSE_RANK, ROW_NUMBER, LAG, LEAD are reflex
·Do 20+ Meta-style problems in their domain
·Time yourself: 25 min per medium, 35 min per hard
·Record yourself narrating approach aloud, communication is graded

4 weeks out

Pipeline system design

·Design 5 pipelines on paper: daily aggregation, clickstream, CDC, ML feature store, real-time alerting
·For each, write SLA, partition strategy, backfill plan, and cost estimate
·Practice with a friend, senior-level system design is 50% driving the conversation
·Review Meta's open-source and engineering blog for in-house patterns

2 weeks out

Behavioral polish and mock loops

·Rehearse every story out loud. Cut to 2-3 minutes each
·Run 2 full mock loops with a senior DE or coach
·Identify your 3 weakest behavioral areas and draft additional stories
·Review recent Meta news or earnings call for fresh talking points

Week of

Taper and logistics

·No new content. Review your notes only
·Sleep. Mental energy matters more than one more practice problem
·Confirm logistics: laptop charged, shared-doc tool tested, snack and water nearby
·Remember: the loop is rooting for you to raise the bar, not to fail

Adjacent guides to check

Meta Senior Data Engineer (global guide)→Meta Data Engineer Salary→Meta Interview Guide→Data Engineer Interview Prep (hub)→

FAQ

Common questions

What level is Senior Data Engineer at Meta?: At Meta, Senior Data Engineer corresponds to the IC5 level. The bar emphasizes independent technical leadership and cross-team influence without people-management responsibilities.
How much does a Meta Senior Data Engineer in New York make?: Total compensation for Meta Senior Data Engineer in New York ranges $215K–$260K base • $420K–$620K total (IC5). Ranges shift by team and negotiation.
Does Meta actually hire data engineers in New York?: Yes, Meta maintains a New York office and hires Senior Data Engineer data engineers there. Team assignment may be office-locked or global; confirm with the recruiter before the loop.
How is the Senior Data Engineer loop different from other levels at Meta?: The format of the loop matches other levels; difficulty and evaluation shift to independent technical leadership and cross-team influence, and questions at this level dig into independent system design and cross-team influence.
How long should I prepare for the Meta Senior Data Engineer interview?: Most working DEs find 8-10 weeks is about right. The technical prep scales with experience; the behavioral story bank is where candidates underestimate time.
Does Meta interview data engineers differently than software engineers?: Yes, the DE track at Meta emphasizes SQL depth, warehouse and pipeline design, and real production data experience (late data, backfills, quality checks), which generalist SWE loops don't test.