When preparing for the Meta PE OA, candidates often underestimate the hybrid challenge it presents—blending systems thinking with practical coding. Unlike traditional SWE assessments, Meta PE OA is crafted to evaluate how well you can write scalable, reliable, and maintainable code under real‐world conditions. This blog shares key question types and preparation strategies to help you stand out.
Meta PE OA Question 1
You are monitoring energy usage in a smart grid system and need to identify specific data patterns in the readings.
Given an array of integers readings representing the energy readings over a period and an integer k, count the readings that are powers of k. In this context, a power of k refers to numbers that can be expressed as k raised to an integer power (e.g., k⁰, k¹, k², etc.).
Note: You are not expected to provide the most optimal solution, but a solution with time complexity no worse than O(readings.length²) will fit within the execution time limit.
Example
For readings = [2, 4, 7, 8, 16, 32, 120] and k = 2, the output should be:solution(readings, k) = 5
Explanation
Meta PE OA Question 2
You’ve been hired by a company to help simulate the spread of disease in orchards to devise containment strategies.
Given a 2D grid orchard, where each cell is represented by a character:
"-"(empty),"T"(healthy tree),"R"(rotten tree).
Each day, rot spreads to adjacent cells (up, down, left, right) from any rotten tree. Healthy trees adjacent to rotten trees will become rotten.
Given an integer days, simulate the spread of rot over the orchard for the specified number of days. Return the state of the orchard as a 2D grid of strings after the simulation.
Note: You are not expected to provide the most optimal solution, but a solution with time complexity no worse than O(days × rows × cols) will fit within the execution time limit.
Meta PE OA Question 3
Imagine that there are several lamps placed on a number line, each of which illuminates some segment of the line. Specifically, the lamps are represented in a two-dimensional array lamps, where the ith lamp covers the segment from lamps[i][0] to lamps[i][1], inclusive.
Additionally, you are given a list of control points on this number line, represented by an array points. Your task is to find the number of lamps that illuminate each control point. Specifically, for each control point points[j] in the array, count the number of lamps lamps[i] for which points[j] lies within the covered segment [lamps[i][0], lamps[i][1]].
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