I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb in Sep 2025
Interview
Absolute mess and a total waste of time.
I was contacted by a recruiter and presented with a front-end heavy software engineering role to interview for. The scheduling process was a nightmare with how broken their scheduling software is, the crummy interface, and the inconsistency in available times. The process was painfully slow as well.
When it came to the "onsite," just wow. While I had a couple great interviewers, the two interviews that actually mattered were a mess. The systems design interview didn't match the job nor their interview packet they gave you to prep with whatsoever, being more for a very niche devops role than for a full stack engineer especially a front end focused one. Then for the coding puzzle interview, which you get 45 minutes for, the interviewer not only showed up almost 10 minutes late, but took another almost 10 minutes to set up and find their interview question, but then struggled to actually explain that question as it was clear they didn't even understand the question and probably only skimmed it based on them contradicting their previous statements about the problem multiple times when I probed for details, then made disparaging statements towards my speed over how long I was taking as if I didn't spend the first half of the interview waiting to get started and was only about 5 minutes into the interview, saying I should be almost done by then.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard coding puzzle, but leetcode hard level instead of medium like most companies
I had a terrible experience interviewing with Airbnb. Each step in the process took > 1 month and by the end I lost all interest. My recruiter was unresponsive and unhelpful. The engineers interviewing me were disengaged and uninterested.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
signed an NDA but standard data structures and algorithms
Online assessment given by recruiter via email before proceeding to virtual interview. Time limit to complete the problem and submit answer for review to determine whether you continue to the next round.