Before the Technical Screen. 5 single-table-and-basic-join problems that gate entry to a 45–60 min CoderPad screen.

Meta's Technical Screen assumes you can already write a clean 2-table JOIN, a GROUP BY aggregation, and a basic date filter. If any of these feel slow, fix that first — Meta will move past these in the first 5 minutes.

• Most relevant for: every role (universal floor at Meta)
• Skip if: you're senior — jump to Stage 2
• Domain: social-graph + ad-tech (Meta's two business surfaces)

The dedicated 45-min SQL round inside Meta's Full Loop onsite. A peer IC extends one or two hard questions for 30+ minutes with probing follow-ups:

"Now add a 1-day forgiveness window…" "Now partition this by visibility…" "What if two messages arrive at the same second?"

Patterns tested (the Meta canon):

• Top-N within group — ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY user_id ORDER BY ...)
• Running totals / DAU rolling — SUM(...) OVER (... ROWS BETWEEN ...)
• Moving averages — Meta's 7-day rolling DAU shape
• Anti-joins — "published posts without reactions" / "pages with no likes"
• Self-join symmetric — "mutual follow pairs" / friend-of-friend
• Islands-and-Gaps streak detection — the classic date − ROW_NUMBER() trick (one Medium writeup claims "80% of Meta DE candidates fail this")
• Sessionization with idle timeout — LAG + cumulative-sum to assign session_ids when consecutive events exceed a 30-min gap

This is where Meta separates IC3/IC4 from IC5 candidates — window-function fluency is the gate.

• Most relevant for: DSA, DSP, DE
• Also mirrors: Apple onsite SQL, Netflix sessionization deep-dive, Google L5 SQL

The 45-min product-sense round. "No math, no one right answer" — but you'll still write SQL.

The interviewer hands you an under-specified business prompt:

"How would you measure Reels' content health?" "What's the right metric for group quality?" "If you had to score user engagement on one number, what would go into it?"

You're being graded on judgment, scope, and metric design. The SQL is downstream — the harder skill is deciding what to compute.

The 6 problems are deliberately multi-CTE composite-score scorecards:

• Content virality report — engagement/reach composite
• Group health dashboard — 2-CTE classifier
• User influence scorecard — multi-metric weighted
• Trust & Safety report — 5-CTE moderation aggregate
• User engagement dashboard — 6-CTE weighted composite (the capstone)
• Comment-thread depth — recursive CTE

Every explainer ends with a "How an IC6 interviewer would extend this" section — staff-level probing follow-ups.

• Most relevant for: IC5+ candidates at Meta (DSA, DSP); LinkedIn, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest analytics
• Also mirrors: Stripe analytical-reasoning, Google product-sense onsite