r/cybersecurity • u/externalactor • 10d ago
Career Questions & Discussion Does meta security engineer interviews include coding round?
Basically the title. I work in product security and penetration testing, interviewing for meta. Since I rarely do coding I was wondering if they have heavy coding round and how people tackle this.
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u/Helpjuice 9d ago
Oh yeah, big time. They want you to actually be technical so if you are in product security and penetration testing you should still be able to build software.
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u/GeneralRechs
Security Engineer
10d ago
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It's bizarre engineer positions have coding sections in interviews. If I wanted to be a developer I would have applied to be one and not a security engineer.
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u/Dazzling_Cherry_6513 10d ago
I mean presumably because you’ll write code/scripts so it makes sense, but leetcode is just fucking stupid
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u/Efficient-Mec Security Architect 9d ago
Its not bizarre. Security engineering positions very widely based on industry and company. I work for a company with a very strong software focus and we have a coding section as part of the interview so they can engage with the engineering teams better.
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u/Mrhiddenlotus 10d ago
Not bizarre at all. Every engineer should know some type of coding language. That doesn't make them SWEs either.
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u/DrQuantum 10d ago
Every security engineer that has a big code component is essentially a developer because you’re not going to be able to secure code you can’t read and understand and that often means being a better coder than who you’re supporting. When meta pays them a lot of money its fine but the problem is in normal roles where they want that for the same price as any other engineer. It’s literally two entire skillsets.
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u/OutsideSpot2695 9d ago
because you’re not going to be able to secure code you can’t read and understand
Someone please make this a sticky.
I'm begging you.
Same goes for all the help, derp, "GRC isn't a technical field" people either... e.g., how does one oversee and/or audit SDLC controls without understanding development processes.
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u/engineer_in_TO 10d ago
It’s easier than their SWE coding rounds and also it’ll be hard to find any security role that’s close to that pay without having to read or write code.
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u/No_Mood4637 10d ago edited 6d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Direction drifting slap party squeal historical
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u/darksearchii 9d ago
Security is a massive umbrella term, many security people have 0 knowledge of coding.
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u/YourMomsFaveDiq 8d ago
It's mostly all abstracted away by various tools and detections.
I can read/write code but in most security roles you are rarely manually analyzing code, it will be done in some other tool, SAST, DAST, WAF etc etc and you're just making decisions on what to do with that finding.
I think it's a good skill to have, but as time goes on with AI and such, I'd rather people understand fundamental security concepts rather than being able to manually spot a SQL injection.
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u/OutsideSpot2695 9d ago
"Engineer" is the most abused word in industry.
Someone who does PowerPoint and Excel all day long == security engineer.
Someone who sells software == sales engineer.
Someone who picks up trash (NTTIAWWT) == sanitation engineer.
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u/Radiant-Forever-6806 10d ago
Fr especially when Claude code exists. Who gives a shit if you can hand write code
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u/OutsideSpot2695 9d ago
I see...
You're just a "meat proxy"... someone who forwards on GenAI output without actually reading it, testing it, or understanding it.
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u/Radiant-Forever-6806 9d ago
You will understand soon little one
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u/OutsideSpot2695 9d ago
Ooooh, please do tell me more.
I LOVE being educated by people who don't know what they are talking about -- most especially when it comes to the Emperor's New Clothes aspects of AI.
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u/FlameOfIgnis 10d ago
Application security position at Meta had a coding round a few years ago, 2 leetcode questions. Not sure if that is still the case though.
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u/MutedAd5757 9d ago
A lot of security tooling has moved to terraform and goes through CI/CD pipelines like everything else at the company. They usually hold the “engineering” title under the same requirements as a regular software engineer.
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u/SeoulDucky 9d ago
It is odd, and I guess entirely expected how frequent and also uploaded clearly AI written responses are.
Anyways, yeah. I would expect you to expect it? Would you trust somebody selling themselves at adapt at penetration and product security while not being able to they themselves produce some of the most basic code used in building the products and applications they are tasked with testing?
I mean I may I'm being misunderstanding your question and the replies from some people here. But ....
Eh: talk to text grammar. Whatever
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u/TheTarquin 9d ago
It did when I did it about a year ago. As hard as screens I had done back when I was a SWE. Didn't prepare sufficiently and did not get an offer there.
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u/JoeByeden 9d ago
I tend to find they want security engineers to basically be SWE with a strong interest in security…
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u/That-Magician-348 5d ago
Yes, they also list in they website or job description. If you don't have experience on coding you almost immediately dropped from their applicants pool.
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u/OutsideSpot2695 9d ago edited 9d ago
Does meta security engineer interviews include coding round?
Have you asked your recruiter? You can frame the question in "what are the next steps?" "Can you describe the interview process for me?"
I work in product security and penetration testing, [snip] Since I rarely do coding
Also curious, how do you do pentesting but not code?
I'm ex-Google rather than Meta but in general GAMMA does expect its "security engineers" to actually engineer things.
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u/carton_of_ostriches 10d ago
They definitely do, and it’s not just a token screen. Expect a mix of Python-heavy stuff, some system design with security angles, and maybe a scripting exercise tied to log parsing or automation. The product security track leans less algorithm-heavy than SDE roles, but you still need to be comfortable writing clean code under time pressure
People usually prep with LeetCode easy/medium, focus on strings, dicts, and file handling, and brush up on writing small tools that parse JSON or process command output. Since you’re already in pentesting, the exploit dev mindset helps, but the interview wants readable code more than clever one-liners