I had my friend refer me to the recruiter. The interview scheduling process and the recruiter were very nice, and they provided a lot of useful materials for interview preparation.

The onsite interview consisted of:

• 2 coding interviews
• 2 architect interviews
• 2 cross-functional interviews
• 1 experience interview

The coding questions had high requirements; you needed to produce a runnable result in 45 minutes. The cross-functional interviews were also an important part of the Airbnb interview, asking why I chose the company.

I failed both architect rounds. There were two system design questions, which are well-known on Glassdoor and which I had prepared for. However, I received two negative responses in those rounds.

The first question was to design a translating system. I believe I came up with a design that met the interviewer's requirements, and it seemed the interviewer was satisfied.

The other question was a key-value cache design. I think the interviewer was not satisfied during that round. He tried to dig deeper to understand if I had overall and detailed knowledge of the system. What made me struggle was it was hard to grasp what he was asking, and I felt he was not satisfied with my answers. I may need to think more about system design interview expectations after these failures.

Overall, I think the interview process itself was good, and the recruiter was much friendlier than the Amazon recruiter.

Design a key-value pair caching storage.