Airtable Software Engineer Interview Experience — Weak BQ, a Dispatcher Coding Round, and a Fast Rejection

Onsite. The rest of the loop covered questions that have already been discussed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again in detail.

The behavioral question round was the usual boilerplate. I hadn't prepared for it, and I also didn't click with the hiring manager, so I answered pretty badly — I'm guessing this is where I get rejected. One of their signature questions: they push an inclusive culture pretty hard, so they ask what you've personally done at work that was inclusive.

For AI Fluency, it was the "design an NL-to-formula assistant for Airtable" question, which is already covered in a separate writeup.

Then there was Algorithmic Analysis and Code Review — the dispatcher question that's already been discussed on the forum. They hand you a piece of code and mainly want you to analyze its time complexity and then optimize it.

The setup: there's a downstream interface where calls come in asking you to create a new table or resize an existing one, and an upstream interface that's basically a mini Kubernetes letting you create a new workload or move a workload around (I don't remember the exact details, but that's roughly it). So as the dispatcher, whenever a downstream call comes in you have to figure out whether you need to schedule it onto a new machine, whether the memory on the current machine is still enough after a table gets resized, and if not, which machine to move it to, and so on. You need to decide what data structure to use to store the table and machine data, and if something needs to move, what policy to use for scheduling the workloads based on the memory changes. All of it is just in code — no third-party DB involved, and you don't need to worry about multithreading.

They give you correct, bug-free code and have you gradually optimize the data structure. I don't actually know what the "correct" answer was supposed to be — I just answered in the direction of adding caching, sorting, sharding, that kind of thing.

Update (2026-02-10): I got an offer from another company, so I pinged them for a status update. They got back to me quickly and told me I was rejected.