FAANG Interview Preparation Guide: Crack Big Tech the Right Way

FAANG interview preparation: start with a mock, not a list

Most people start FAANG prep by opening a problem list. A better first step is a mock interview. One honest scorecard from an engineer who has sat on FAANG loops tells you whether your weak spot is coding speed, system design or your behavioural stories, and that decides how you should spend the next 12 weeks. For experienced engineers, it also tells you which level you'd land at today.

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5+ years in? Book a senior system design mock

This page is our FAANG hub. It covers the full prep plan and links to our detailed guide for every company, so you can start here and go deeper wherever you need to.

How FAANG interviews work in 2026

The big tech loops look different on the surface, but they test the same four things.

For freshers, coding decides almost everything. From around three to five years of experience, system design starts to decide your level, and the behavioural round starts to carry real weight. At Amazon, Leadership Principle questions show up in every round. At Google and Meta, a weak design round is the most common reason for a downlevel.

That's why the plan below changes depending on your experience. Freshers spend most of their time on DSA. Senior engineers split their time more evenly.

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The 12-week FAANG preparation timeline

This is the plan for someone with one to five years of experience and about two hours a day. Here's how to adjust it.

If you're a fresher, stretch weeks 1 to 8 into 10 weeks and keep design light. Most fresher loops have no design round, so your time is better spent on DSA speed.

If you have five or more years of experience, start system design in week 3 and run it alongside DSA. Aim for one full design practice a week. Write your behavioural stories by week 6, so you have time to rehearse them out loud.

Whatever your level, don't skip the mocks. The baseline mock in week 1 shows you where to focus. The full loop mock in week 12 tells you whether you're ready or should push your interview date.

Book your week-1 baseline mock

DSA patterns to master for FAANG

FAANG coding rounds reuse a small set of patterns. Learn to spot them and most new problems stop feeling new.

Hashing. Counting, grouping and fast lookups.
Two pointers. Sorted arrays, pairs, and removing duplicates in place.
Sliding window. Longest or shortest subarrays and substrings with a condition.
Stack and monotonic stack. Next greater element, valid brackets, histogram areas.
Binary search. On sorted data, and on the answer itself ("minimum capacity to ship in D days").
Linked lists. Reversal, cycle detection, merging.
Trees. DFS, BFS, lowest common ancestor, serialisation.
Heaps. Top K, merging sorted lists, running medians.
Graphs. BFS for shortest paths, DFS for components, topological sort for dependencies.
Union-find. Connected components and grouping problems.
Intervals. Merging, inserting and meeting rooms.
Backtracking. Subsets, permutations, combinations.
Dynamic programming. 1D, 2D grids, knapsack-style choices, and strings.
Tries. Prefix search and word problems.
Greedy. Scheduling and jump-style problems.

A pattern-based list like NeetCode 150 covers all of these. Our NeetCode 150 vs Blind 75 vs LeetCode 150 comparison helps you pick the right one for your timeline.

System design for FAANG interviews

If you have three or more years of experience, system design is the round most likely to decide your level. Interviewers give you an open prompt, like "design a URL shortener" or "design a news feed", and expect you to lead the conversation for 45 minutes.

A simple structure keeps you on track:

Requirements (5 minutes). Who uses it, what it must do, and what it doesn't need to do.
Scale (5 minutes). Rough numbers for users, requests per second and storage.
API and data model (5 to 10 minutes). The main endpoints and tables.
High-level design (10 minutes). Clients, services, databases, caches and queues.
Deep dive (15 minutes). One or two hard parts, like hot keys, consistency or fan-out.
Wrap-up (5 minutes). Bottlenecks, failures and what you'd improve.

The topics that come up most are caching, sharding, replication, message queues, rate limiting, consistency trade-offs and how to handle failures. For a full walkthrough with the 15 most common questions, read our system design interview preparation guide.

Get your system design round scored

Best YouTube channels for FAANG prep

Free video content is good for learning concepts. Use it alongside timed practice, since watching a solution isn't the same as producing one under pressure.

For DSA

NeetCode. Clear video solutions for every NeetCode 150 problem, grouped by pattern.
take U forward (Striver). Popular with Indian engineers. Deep DSA playlists and a structured sheet.
Abdul Bari. Slow, thorough explanations of core algorithms. Good if your fundamentals are rusty.

For system design

ByteByteGo. Short animated explainers on how real systems work.
Gaurav Sen. Clear explanations of distributed systems concepts.
Hello Interview. Full mock-style walkthroughs of common FAANG design questions.

For behavioural and mock interviews

Exponent. Recorded mock interviews across coding, design and behavioural rounds.

Pick one channel per area and stick with it. Jumping between channels feels productive but slows you down.

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What each FAANG company tests

The core prep is the same everywhere. What changes is where each company puts its weight.

Google

Google's loop has coding rounds, system design from L4 or L5 upward, and a Googleyness and leadership round. The hiring committee sets your level after the loop, and design feedback does most of the work. Start with our Google mock interview guide, then read the Google L4 interview experience or the Google L5 / L6 senior interview experience, depending on your level.

Amazon

Amazon tests its 16 Leadership Principles in almost every round, and the Bar Raiser can veto an offer. SDE2 candidates are often downlevelled to SDE1 when design or Bar Raiser feedback is mixed. Read the Amazon interview experience India for the round-by-round breakdown, the Amazon Leadership Principles interview guide for your stories, and Amazon mock interview questions for a practice format. Our Amazon salary in India page shows what each level pays.

Apple

Apple hires for specific teams, so the loop depends heavily on the group you're joining. Expect domain questions alongside coding, and a lot of focus on past projects. See our Apple interview experience.

Netflix

Netflix mostly hires experienced engineers. Its culture memo and the "keeper test" idea shape the whole process, and judgment questions carry as much weight as technical ones. See our Netflix interview experience.

Microsoft

Microsoft's loop usually has three or four rounds plus an "as appropriate" round with a senior leader who makes the final call. Levels run from 59 for new grads up through senior and principal bands. See our Microsoft interview experience India.

Book a mock for the company you're targeting

FAANG prep for experienced engineers

If you've been working for five years or more, the usual advice to grind 300 problems isn't the best use of your time. Coding still matters, but it's rarely what costs senior candidates the offer. Design and behavioural rounds are.

Here's a better split for senior prep:

[[table]]
Area | Share of time
DSA | 40%
System design | 40%
Behavioural stories | 20%
[[/table]]

Pick stories that match the level you want. If you're aiming for senior or staff, at least half your stories should involve people outside your own team. And do at least two full mock loops, since the biggest risk at this stage is getting the offer one level lower than you expected. That can cost lakhs a year.

FAQs

How long does it take to prepare for FAANG? About 12 weeks at two hours a day for most engineers with some DSA background. Freshers starting from scratch may need 16 to 20 weeks.

How many LeetCode problems should I solve for FAANG? Around 150 to 200, picked by pattern, is enough for most people. Understanding the patterns matters more than the count.

Do freshers get system design rounds at FAANG? Rarely. Most fresher loops focus on DSA and a behavioural round.

Which FAANG company is easiest to get into from India? Amazon and Microsoft hire the most engineers in India, so they have the most openings. That doesn't make their interviews easier.

Are free YouTube videos enough to prepare for FAANG? They're great for learning concepts. You still need timed practice and at least one mock interview to test yourself under real conditions.

When should I take a mock interview? Once at the start to find your gaps, and again one or two weeks before your real interview.

Book a FAANG mock interview

Turn 12 Weeks of Prep Into an Offer: Take a Mock Interview

A plan gets you ready. A mock tells you whether you are. Practise with an engineer from a top tech company, get a round-by-round scorecard, and find out where you'd be levelled before the real loop.

Book your FAANG mock interview

All our FAANG guides

Google

Amazon

Meta, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft

Prep resources