I was excited about Airtable after talking to the recruiter. It sounded like an exciting company with a collaborative interview experience. The technical screen was challenging, but the interviewer was helpful and wanted me to succeed. I was hoping for the same at the onsite, but things quickly changed.

The onsite consisted of six rounds, four of which were some flavor of systems design. Each of them was extremely difficult, harder than the Google onsite I had had in the same week. One of the challenging parts of this was that each of the challenges was presented under the guise of being "realistic"—that is, a feature that Airtable had already built. Because of this, there was no freedom to design from the ground up but rather to work within arbitrary constraints, some of which weren't very clear.

I walked into each round confused about what was being asked of me, and the interviewers were not of any help. At the end of one round, I asked my interviewer what data structure she had used when she was interviewed with this question, and she said she "couldn't remember" because it had "been a few months." It sounds to me like they are asking extremely challenging questions that their interviewers don't even know the answers to.

Overall, it seems like Airtable is looking for a very specific, very senior engineer. I'm just shocked that after knowing my background (which clearly did not align), they allowed me to enter an onsite that I was not at all prepared for. It was a huge waste of time and, honestly, a red flag for the engineering culture at large.

I signed an NDA, but all the questions were around complicated features that Airtable has already designed.