I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Recruiter outreach (email), led to a call with the recruiter, and then a technical screen (Skype, coding in an online editor) with an engineer, which in turn lead to an onsite.
The onsite was very long, and had me talking to about 7 different team members (mostly engineers, and one interview with a designer for cultural fit); it lasted the entire day.
Lots of tree questions (implement a BST, score sudden-death tournament results with a minimal binary tree data structure, encode an alien dictionary using a tree and then produce a dictionary using topological traversal), and a "rebuild Twitter from the ground up" scaling/architecture question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Store a set of sudden-death tournament results in a compact format (eg. a bit array) and a set of predicted match results (also in a bit array). Score the predictions, giving one point per correctly guessed match, without unpacking the bit array into a more convenient format (ie. you have to traverse the tree in-place).
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2013
Interview
The recruiters I worked with were very good, punctual and responded to emails in a timely manner. They were very accommodating to my schedule and did their best to prepare me for my interviews.
The coding challenge was reasonable although you had to manage your time very carefully and prepare your tools ahead of time as it was timed. The first phone screen was focused on practical problems that were of adequate difficulty and appropriate for the position in question.
The on-site interview is a TIRING experience, I was there for almost 5 hours and was exhausted by the end. I found the technical portion of the interviews quite easy and was really only challenged by one question in 3 hours. Questions were a mix of practical coding problems and CS fundamentals. The culture portion of the interviews was more difficult, there were a range of question from explaining technical topics to a non-technical interviewer, to more personal questions about why/whether you like to travel, how you started programming, how you look at design, etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Some of the culture/personality questions were quite off the wall and hard to answer. For example, explaining to a non-technical interviewer how one would be able to identify elegant code.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
I got to talk to them through a recruiter and after the phone interview went onsite for the full day.
The engineers I talked to I didn't think they were as good quality as some of the other companies I had talked to. Couple of them asked me questions that they were unsure of themselves or gave me the wrong answer and had to go home and figure out why what they said didn't make sense.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Describe what happens when you enter a url in the web browser