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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Whiteboard OOD Round Where Even Checking the Docs Had to Be "Documented"
I interviewed with a specific team at Airbnb, and the experience was pretty bad. First I had a round with the hiring manager, which went well — we had a great conversation. The manager said the next round would be a phone screen: 30 minutes of resume deep dive and 30 minutes of coding. Before the phone screen, I spent time preparing some project talking points and BQ (behavioral questions). Phone…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Senior+ Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Search Ranking and Team Matching
A referred applicant to Airbnb’s personalization and relevance organization reports recruiter contact after two weeks. An initial coding screen asked for book titles to be formatted as a table. Four days later, the applicant advanced to a virtual onsite covering document redaction, project decisions, search ranking without text queries, and retrieval-assisted guidance for customer-support staff.…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Whiteboard OOD Screen With a Difficult Interviewer
I did a team-match interview with a team at Airbnb, and the experience was pretty bad. First I had a round with the manager, and that went really well — we talked and it was a pleasant conversation. Then the manager said the next round would be a phone screen: 30 minutes for a resume deep dive and 30 minutes for coding. Before the phone screen I spent time prepping some project talking points and…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Every Round, Then the Role Was Filled
Background: US bachelor's degree, 4.5 years of experience. Timeline Mid-October: mass-applied on LinkedIn to Airbnb Beijing (the "air mattress" company) — got a recruiter email the same day. A week later: 15-minute HR Screen introducing the role. Late October: 45-minute Tech Screen. Early November: VO1 (Coding 1) and VO2 (Coding 2), 45 minutes each. > Suggest a split stay where you stay at 2 diff…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — A 90-Minute OA With a 4-Level Working Hours Register Problem
Time limit was 90 minutes, four levels total. Implement a Working Hours Register: employees badge in and out of the office, and the system records their working hours, with support for promotions, salary calculation, and bonus-period management. Level 1: Basic CRUD — add an employee, badge an employee in and out, query an employee's total hours worked. Level 2: Sort employees by hours worked and…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Four-Level Banking System Online Assessment
I recently took Airbnb's software engineering online assessment. I hope this question format helps people who take it later. One of the online assessment questions was a banking system or filesystem with unit tests. It was similar to CodeSignal's progressive-level problems. It was not a set of independent LeetCode questions; instead, new requirements kept being added to the same codebase. The ove…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Perfect Cloud-Storage OA Score Followed by Rejection
I received the OA immediately after applying, got a perfect score, then received a rejection email a week later. The problem was a cloud storage system. It had four levels. You only got the next level after finishing and submitting the current one. Level 1: Support adding new files, retrieving files, and copying files. Level 2: Support finding files by matching prefixes and suffixes. Level 3: Sup…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Recipe-Management OA With Brutal Corner Cases
Fresh off the OA, just did it. I'm saying I definitely failed because I only passed two levels. I wrote level 3 but a few test cases wouldn't pass, and I never even got to see level 4. The problem itself isn't hard, but there are a ton of corner cases, and you need every single test case to pass before you can move on to the next level. I also feel like this is a brand new question bank, because…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Auto-Sent CodeSignal OA With a Four-Level Task Management System
I mass-applied, and got the OA invite right away. It was probably sent automatically by the system. Standard CodeSignal Industry Coding Assessment. You have to share your screen the entire time and keep your mic on so it picks up audio. The problem I got was a task management system. Level 1: The task management system should support adding, updating and retrieving tasks. Level 2: The task manage…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer interview experience
I applied for a Staff Software Engineer role and then heard nothing for more than a month. When I finally got an email, it invited me to a CodeSignal technical interview. The interface looked polished and had practice exercises, but the editor felt limited compared with a VS Code-style workspace and lacked conveniences such as autocompletion. The HackerRank-style assessment allowed 90 minutes and…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Bombed the Live Bug-Free Hotel Split-Stay Problem
The interviewer got on the call and, without saying a word, immediately dropped a problem on me. I think I'd seen fragments of this one on the forum before — the hotel split stay problem. But I'd only ever seen little snippets of the description and didn't remember the actual problem in much detail, so I basically treated it as a brand new question. The gist of the problem: it's about booking roo…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — BQ Then a Tree Subsequence Coding Question
For the first round, there's a reference to check, but the post doesn't say what it points to. The second round started with a quick self-introduction and some small talk with the interviewer, then went straight into behavioral questions. We got asked: Talk about a time you taught yourself something — how did you learn it, and did it end up helping you in your actual work later on? Tell me about…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four-Level Banking System OA, Stuck on Level 3 at 440 Points
Level 1: Basic banking operations. Needs to support: Level 2: Top Spenders Requirement: rank accounts based on the total value of outgoing transactions Adds something like: Level 3: Scheduled Payments. The system needs to support: schedule payment accept payment The biggest trap here is the timestamp execution order. It's not just "store a record when schedule_payment is called" and that's it. Ev…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Full-Stack Phone Screen Lands an Onsite Invite
Sharing my full-stack phone screen — I applied for the San Francisco Hybrid position. The process was fast. One week after I submitted my resume, HR scheduled the phone screen. One round, 60 minutes: 40 minutes of live coding followed by 20 minutes of product discussion. The problem was to build a small listing booking widget: Input check-in and check-out dates, calculate the total price Select n…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — In-Memory File System OA, Four Levels Deep
The OA was an in-memory file system design problem: add files, copy files search files with prefix and suffix add users with capacity, add files by user, update user capacity compress and decompress files L1 and L2 were pretty straightforward. L3 required handling the relationship between users and files, and you had to modify the copy_file from L2. The copied file also has a size, and if size >…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Onsite and Core Value, Now Waiting on Team Match
I got laid off in the middle of last year, unfortunately. After that, looking at my mortgage, I felt empty and pessimistic for a while, then started grinding practice problems hard. At first I used a bunch of small companies to warm up, but I was rusty and kept getting rejected all over the place — I was almost losing my confidence. Then I finally got an interview at Airbnb through a referral. Ai…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen, Then a Five-Part Onsite With a Brutal Experience Deep Dive
Phone screen: LC 1235 Onsite Coding: I prepared so much, and then they gave me a problem that wasn't from any of the interview-experience posts: Honestly the problem itself wasn't hard, but you had to handle the input/output strings yourself. I used Java, and with 45 minutes that also had to include small talk, I was pretty nervous, and it was just annoying. Code review: the interviewer was genui…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Strong Start, Onsite Set Up to Fail
Sharing my full Airbnb loop. A friend's classmate referred me in, and I got a response the very next day. Here's the weird thing: the first round was a phone screen with the hiring manager — an HM based somewhere else — 30 minutes, and it went really well. He was a genuinely nice guy, and you could tell right away he was a good manager. What he worked on matched well with my background too, and I…
Interview experiences · Airbnb
Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Tree Sums, a Retry HOF, and a Rental Watchlist Design Question
The interview was on the easier side. The algorithm question was about a tree, where the leaves are numbers and each parent node's value equals the sum of its children. You need to be able to get the value of any given node. The second part adds a mutation: you can turn a node into a leaf, or take a leaf and attach a subtree to it, turning it into a parent node. Again, you need to be able to get…
Interview experiences · Airbus Americas Customer Services
Airbus Americas Customer Services Software Engineer HireVue process
I began with a HireVue interview and answered questions through prerecorded video responses. If HR validated my application, I moved to a manager interview. The early manager involvement depended on clearing that HR gate. The manager conversation was a direct discussion of the role and how I would fit. It did not have heavy technical depth in my experience, but it still seemed to evaluate whether…
Interview experiences · Airbus Americas Customer Services
Airbus Americas Customer Services Software Engineer interview: CV and structures
The interviews leaned heavily on my CV. Two panelists divided the questions between them, and most of the conversation stayed close to my resume. They also tested basic fundamentals rather than advanced or unfamiliar material. A substantial part used scenarios involving aircraft structural concepts. It felt as though they wanted to know whether I understood the principles well enough to apply the…
Interview experiences · Airbus Americas Customer Services
Airbus Americas Customer Services Software Engineer Interview Experience: recorded verbal coding and AI questions
The process began with a proctored online screen that felt unusual. It included a coding question, but instead of writing code, I had to answer verbally while being recorded. That set a different tone from what I expected. A few rounds later, I went to the Airbus office for more interviews. The second and third rounds felt relatively easy and focused heavily on my project history, what I knew abo…
Interview experiences · Airbus Americas Customer Services
Airbus Americas Customer Services Software Engineer interview: motivation and wait
The process began with a quick initial call about the company and my motivation. It also covered why I wanted to work in Spain, so the location question was specific rather than generic. Then I met with a manager and HR in a fairly classic format: discussion of my profile and CV, motivations, and a mix of technical and personal-fit themes depending on what they wanted to explore. From the early v…
Interview experiences · Airbus Americas
Airbus Americas Software Engineer HireVue and manager discussions
I started with the fully automated HireVue video stage. I recorded answers to preset questions with limited preparation time, enough to plan wording but not fully compose it. I could rerecord for each question in at least part of the process, so it felt more like iterating on delivery than brainstorming live. After HR validated me, I had a manager interview about my background, fit, and situation…