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 behavioral questions.

Phone screen: the interviewer was a woman, and the experience was bad. She didn't do any self-introduction at all — I asked if she wanted to introduce herself, and all she said was, "I'm a senior engineer."

The question was an OOD design problem: design an Airbnb wallet. The whole coding section lasted 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 I'd been told to expect.

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

The test code given after the coding portion wasn't in the language I'd picked, and she made me translate it into my chosen language myself.

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

The whole time she stared at where my eyes were looking and warned me that I wasn't allowed to use any AI tool, or she'd have to document it. I offered to share my screen to prove I wasn't using anything, but she refused and said there was no need.

In the end I only finished running the test code for one section — there wasn't time left to write the other two sections' tests. And that was it, we just moved on.