I was a referral, so I had a phone screen with the hiring manager first, then a call with the recruiter to describe the interview process.

There is a take-home assignment that estimates 2-4 hours of time, but I ended up spending a lot more time on it than 4 hours. You have the option to present questions to engineers at the company, and I highly recommend doing this to best understand the expectations.

Next, there is an hour-long interview to present your take-home and explain your development decisions and any assumptions you made. They will ask questions about how you think you would handle changes for new requirements.

There is a 1-hour system design interview. My question was designing the data model for specific Airbnb features. There is a 1-hour behavioral interview, followed by a 1-hour interview discussing general computer science concepts.

I rated the interview difficult because there is a lot of time and effort involved in interviewing. However, I think Carta's process gives candidates a fairer chance to showcase their abilities, especially if you put a lot of time into the take-home assignment like I did. I found this experience much more enjoyable than trying to express my abilities through a LeetCode-style coding question, which seems to be standard for a lot of software engineer interviewing.

Design a data model for an Airbnb feature.

Choose two languages from your resume and describe which language is faster.