How to get into Instagram: the experience of Daniyar Eralin

Daniyar Yeralin passed dozens of interviews at the largest companies in the US and today leads a team of engineers at Instagram Ads. In an exclusive interview, he shares his interview experience, the specifics of working at Meta, and life in America.

Daniyar Yeralin, city — New York, Engineering Manager at Instagram, Instagram

About Me

I work as an engineering manager at Instagram. I have been in the IT industry for about 10 years — I started as a programmer and worked at companies such as Amazon and IBM Quantum.

How to get into Instagram

Like all candidates, I went through a fairly rigorous selection process during the interviews. Overall, the process took about six months: during this time, I passed approximately 30 interviews at six different US companies. Since I applied for a management position, the interviews consisted of a combination of technical and behavioral interviews.

For those planning to live and work abroad, I advise first of all to have a good command of English at a conversational level, have a strong technical background — a portfolio of projects in your resume, practice in solving algorithmic problems, and experience developing systems at scale. And, of course, there is always an element of luck.

Work specifics

I lead a team of iOS, Android, and backend developers at Instagram Ads. My team is responsible for ad posts in the main Instagram feed.

The most unusual aspect of our work is that all developers and management must have a deep understanding of data analytics, as every product change is measured by hundreds of metrics for an audience of billions of users. We constantly run hundreds of experiments in real time, analyze data, and based on it form hypotheses about how users react to our changes.

Specifically in my role as a manager, I am also responsible for the career growth and development of my employees. I help the team resolve conflicts, improve their technical and communication skills, and build processes for successful task execution. In my work, I try to be not only a manager but also a mentor.

The biggest challenge in my work is the Meta culture of fast execution, Move Fast, where several projects can be executed simultaneously. For example, at the moment, my team is running 12 projects in parallel, and my task is to correctly set priorities, coordinate efforts, and help employees cope with the high pace of work.

About life abroad

I have been living in the US for 13 years, about 10 of which have been in New York. I first came here for studies, graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Computer Science, and last year received an MBA from Columbia University.

Although I have not worked outside the US, I can say that even here each company builds its own unique culture. For example, at Amazon, there was a strong emphasis on the culture of quality documentation: all documents were written as carefully as possible. One of the most unusual practices was that all meetings began with a "silent reading," where all participants read the document before moving on to its discussion.