Airbnb Software Engineer interview experience

The prompt was geometry/spatial logic, and it had a follow-up question, which kept me from just stopping after the initial part.

The surprising thing was that I didn’t need to run the code. It was still a coding exercise, but the focus was on reasoning through the solution rather than verifying via execution. The whole setup felt more like explaining and implementing the algorithm cleanly than building and testing an app.

The screen didn’t end with an offer, but it was a fairly distinct kind of technical assessment compared to the typical “run your program and debug” vibe.