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 screen: the interviewer was a woman, and the experience was bad. There was no self-introduction at all — I asked if she wanted to introduce herself, and she just said, "I'm a senior engineer."

The question was an OOD (object-oriented design) problem — design and write an Airbnb wallet. The whole coding section ran for 50 minutes, and there was no resume deep dive at all. She kept following up and challenging me the entire time — nothing like the 30 minutes of coding she'd described beforehand.

The coding environment was a whiteboard, but they still wanted the code to actually run, and they didn't give me a main function — I had to write it myself. Since it was a whiteboard setup with no package references provided, I asked if I could check the public documentation. She said I could, but I'd have to document that I did it. Later, when writing the main function, I asked if I could check a template for it, and she said I could, but again I'd have to document it — because other candidates could manage without it, but apparently I couldn't.

After the coding, the test code she gave me wasn't even in the language I'd chosen — she made me translate it into my language myself.

Her English was pretty poor, and communication was difficult. When I tried to discuss the problem with her to clarify it, she said multiple times, "you need to read the question by yourself."

The whole time, she stared right at my eyes, warning me not to use any AI tools or she'd have to document it. I offered to share my screen to prove I wasn't using any AI tools, but she refused and said it wasn't necessary.

In the end I only managed to get one section's test code running — there wasn't enough time left for the other two sections. Then we moved on.