The interview process was surprisingly much easier than with many other companies I considered. Ultimately, I chose Airbnb because of the interesting problems they were solving and their culture.

I will preface this by mentioning that when speaking to recruiters and engineers after joining, they told me they actively monitor Glassdoor postings and work to ensure that minimal problems are repeated, giving everyone a fair chance. Engineers also each have a few preferred problems, so the pool of different interview questions is quite large.

It was a very straightforward process.

• Technical phone screen: a fairly practical question, a standard string manipulation question.

I was invited to the on-site interview the following week. Everyone was very friendly, and speaking with them further convinced me to accept the offer.

There were two coding questions, again, straightforward. I appreciate that they don’t ask difficult LeetCode-style questions that you would rarely use in real life. Instead, they asked practical, thoughtful problems. One involved a command-line interface that performed simple calculations; it was more about how appropriately you could model and structure your code based on the requirements, rather than hammering out an algorithm. The second involved collaboratively building a message dispatch system with some boilerplate code. This one was quite fun. I was never asked about Big O, which I appreciate.

There were two core value interviews, which were very simple: just talk about yourself and what you like to do. These are more for you to understand their company culture.

• Architecture: build a blog system, which was pretty easy. Ensure you have a deep understanding of deadlocks and mutexes. I had to dig deep into my experience at my first job for this one! I would recommend doing some heavy reading on processes and threads before your interview.
• Experience: a simple discussion about your previous experience, including highs and lows. The more honest, the better.

I received an offer within a week and couldn't be happier right now!

Variation of string reversal.

Study CPU process/thread resource contention. A big must!