So you want to land a job at a FAANG company. Whether it’s Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Google (you’ll also see this group called “MAANG” or simply “Big Tech” these days), the good news is that preparing for one of these interviews is mostly the same work. The companies love to seem mysterious, but underneath it all they’re testing the same core skills. Below I’ll walk you through exactly what those skills are and how to prepare for each one.

Let me say one thing up front that will save you a lot of stress: there is no secret “FAANG” body of knowledge. People search for “Google interview questions” or “Meta coding questions” expecting a special list, but the fundamentals are nearly identical across companies. Master the fundamentals and you can walk into any of these interviews.

The three rounds you have to prepare for

Almost every FAANG loop comes down to three types of interviews:

• Coding / data structures and algorithms — classic problem solving. This is the biggest chunk for most candidates.
• System design — how you’d architect a real system at scale. This matters more the more senior you are.
• Behavioral — how you work, how you handle conflict, why you want the job. This one quietly decides a huge number of offers.

Most candidates over-index on coding and neglect the other two. Don’t make that mistake — a strong coder with a weak behavioral round gets rejected all the time.

What FAANG coding interviews actually test

FAANG coding questions almost always come down to a handful of recurring patterns. Understand these deeply and you’ll recognize them no matter how the question is dressed up:

• Arrays and strings — two pointers, sliding window, prefix sums
• Hash maps and sets — frequency counting, finding pairs, deduplication
• Trees and graphs — BFS, DFS, shortest paths
• Recursion and backtracking — here’s how I teach recursion using real-world examples
• Dynamic programming — just recursion plus memoization; here’s how to know when a problem is a DP problem

A focused 150–200 problems that you genuinely understand will beat 500 you memorized. And whatever the problem, always start with a brute force solution first. If you want the full breakdown, I cover the only 6 types of questions you need to know.

The big 2026 change: AI-assisted interviews

This is the part most prep guides haven’t caught up to. Through late 2025 and 2026, several FAANG companies started letting candidates use AI during the coding round rather than banning it. Meta rolled out an AI-assisted format (in a CoderPad environment with frontier models available), and Google began piloting AI-assisted coding rounds for some roles. Companies like Canva and Shopify have done the same.

What this means for you:

• The questions get harder and more open-ended. When AI can write the boilerplate, interviewers lean on ambiguous, realistic problems that require real engineering judgment.
• You’re judged on how you work with AI — writing clear prompts, spotting when it’s wrong, debugging and verifying its output, and making the final call yourself.
• Fundamentals matter more, not less. You can’t verify or debug an AI’s solution if you don’t understand the underlying patterns.

Not every company allows this yet, and policies vary by role and level — so always confirm the format with your recruiter before the interview.

System design (especially for mid-level and senior roles)

If you’re past the entry level, expect at least one system design round. You don’t need to have built the next Netflix, but you should be comfortable with the building blocks: load balancing, caching, databases and sharding, queues, and the trade-offs between them. Meta tends toward product-focused design (user experience, A/B testing), while Amazon leans into scale and reliability.

Behavioral — the round that decides more offers than you think

The behavioral round is often the deciding factor. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and prepare 8–10 stories you can adapt to whatever they ask. Amazon is a special case: their interviews are built around their Leadership Principles, so map stories to those. I go deep on all of this in my guide to behavioral interviews for software engineers.

How to actually prepare (a realistic plan)

You don’t need a year — a focused 8–12 weeks works for most people. Spend the first month relearning the core patterns on easy/medium problems, the second month on medium/hard under a timer plus system design and behavioral stories, and the final stretch on full mock loops. If your interview is sooner, I’ve got you covered with how to prepare when you only have one week and what to do in the 24 hours before.

The single highest-leverage thing you can do right now is master a focused set of the most common questions until the patterns are automatic. That’s exactly why I put together my free guide to the 50 most common coding interview questions — grab it below and start there.

I hear this question asked over and over again. Are there company specific ways to study for software engineer interviews at the big 4?  Well big 5 now. Whether you are looking to interview at any of the FAANG companies (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Google) you are probably searching for the proper way to study for each specifically. But you know what? That’s actually not the right approach. You are asking the wrong question and I’ll explain what I mean.

Most of the time the biggest issue behind this question is that most people are not nearly at the point where they actually need to be worrying about whether they are doing company specific prep or not.

What I mean by that is that most people just have so much of the fundamentals that they still need to work on, that working on the FAANG coding interview specific prep is just the icing on the cake.

So if you use the cake analogy you can't frost a cake that doesn't exist right? And so why are we worrying about the frosting before we actually have the cake.

And this is the problem that I see a lot of people run into because most people have not focused enough on the core technical skills and the core interview skills to be able to even think about what are these specifics of these different companies. You can’t just go straight to Google interview questions or Meta interview questions specifically, until you have mastered the basics.

So, what should you do?

The first thing you should do is focus on the fundamentals. This is something that people really tend to skip a lot and it's even more important if you did a bootcamp or you didn't study computer science as an undergrad.

What does this look like?

This looks like going through all of those common data structures and algorithms and reviewing them. It looks like going through a linked list and understanding not only what a linked list is and how to implement it, but what are all of those common algorithms that go along with linked list?

So for example how do I reverse a linked list? How do I insert a node into a linked list? How do I delete a node? How do I swap two nodes? All of these questions are core to that fundamental understanding of what a linked list is. And most people have not gone through this nearly enough.

There are a lot of pretty tricky questions out there just within this realm of fundamentals.

For example deleting a node from a binary tree, do you actually know how to do that right now? Because if you don't you probably need to go back and review. These should all be things that you can just pull out of a hat because you already know exactly how to do them. And so if you don't know how to do them that's the place that you need to start. Coding interviews are just a matter of combining all of these different patterns from different places, and those patterns start with the fundamentals. So if you don't know your fundamentals you won't have the patterns to draw on.

The next thing that you should do once you understand those fully, all of those patterns, and all of those different fundamental data structures, is to understand how to solve these problems. The problems that you might see in your interview and learn how to get unstuck when you see them. This is one of the biggest problems that I see people have. It's not that they actually don't know the stuff they need to know to solve the problem. As long as they’ve done their fundamentals they know everything they need to know to solve the problem. But the issue is that they are getting stuck somewhere and don't know how to get unstuck.

So the next most important thing is to really understand and practice of getting unstuck in a problem when you see it. I wrote a blog post about this if you want to check it out. There are ten different techniques that I use to get unstuck when I'm working on an interview question and I don't know what to do.

I highly recommend that you check that out, because that's a super important thing to cover. And now only once you've done all of these things and only once you feel really confident on answering interview questions in general, this is when you can start to look at company specific prep. This is when you're just tweaking around the edges where you're basically good and you know everything you need to know, it's just that little bit of refinement that's gonna put you over the edge for your FAANG coding interview. And really give you that leg up when you go to the company.

The key thing here if you're looking for that information is go to GlassDoor.com. GlassDoor is hands down the best place for this information. What you’ll find at GlassDoor:

• Interview questions that people were asked at the company
• What sort of experiences people had
• What you can expect when you go into the interview

You only want to do this at the very end when you're trying to refine everything. This is the point where I like to work with people who really have everything nailed down and then we can get into that FAANG company specific stuff and really research and figure out what they need to know for that company.

If you're worried about preparing for a specific company, focus on overall prep first. Then you can come back to worrying about that company later, once you've got that really nailed down.