The recruiter contacted me a few days after I applied online for an initial phone screen. It was very straightforward, just gauging my interests and motivations.

The first technical phone screen followed very shortly after, which was also very straightforward. The interviewer was pretty engaging and responsive, and definitely gave me a few hints along the way. However, you must be extremely prepared with CS fundamentals.

I got a callback a day later notifying me that I would move on to the next technical phone screen. This one was a little easier than the first, so it was pretty manageable. The interviewer seemed to like my approach and was also very positive and engaging throughout the experience.

That afternoon, they told me I was moving on to the onsite, which I scheduled for the next week. The onsite consisted of:

• One coding interview
• Two culture fit interviews
• Lunch
• Experience interview
• Architecture interview
• One last coding interview

The onsite coding interviews were actually the same caliber as the tech phone screen interviews, thankfully, so don't expect them to get progressively harder. One of the interviewers told me that they recently refreshed their interview question bank with new questions, a lot of which they provide and make up on their own. Needless to say, none of the questions I saw on Glassdoor before this were remotely close to what I was asked. It was still pretty manageable though, if you do your preparation.

One thing I should have been more prepared on was semaphores and mutexes. They asked me in-depth about processes for about 20 minutes, and my knowledge was only pretty intermediate. It makes sense, I guess, since the engineers do dev ops on their own, which is respectable. Make sure to study advanced details on processes, threads, and scheduling.

Also, make sure to get up to speed on intermediate to advanced Discrete Math; that was a common theme.

The rest of the interviews were straightforward. Culture-fit was pleasant. As long as you have creative answers, you'll be fine. Don't be caught off guard by the abrupt, quirky questions. If you're quick on your feet and can prove to substantiate your answers, it will go well.

Experience was just a high-level, casual conversation about my resume. It didn't go in-depth at all, with no whiteboarding. I got to ask the engineer a lot of questions here due to the extra time left.

1. Implement an algorithm to rotate a binary tree.
2. Change the algorithm for trees with 1 to n children nodes.
3. Iterative implementation.

Given a string (no spaces) and a pattern, determine if they match.

• "xyzxy" and "airbnbairbn" return true.
• "ccc" and "airairair" return true.

With two words and a separate list of words, find the shortest sequence between the two words where only one letter is changed at a time. Ensure the sequence of words is returned as a list (solution only valid with backtracking).

Architect and design an Airbnb clone.