Airbnb
Online marketplace for lodging with strong data science and infrastructure.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Airbnb's core value is 'Be a Host'. Tell me about a time you had to embody this value while supporting internal software engineering teams during a major infrastructure outage.
#Core Values
#Empathy
#Incident Response
#Communication
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you strongly disagreed with a product engineering team about an architectural decision, such as choosing a specific AWS service. How did you resolve the conflict?
#Conflict Resolution
#Stakeholder Management
#Influence
Cloud Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Airbnb moves fast, but infrastructure mistakes can be costly. Tell me about a time you had to deploy an urgent hotfix to production infrastructure. How did you balance speed with safety?
#Risk Management
#Agility
#Production Support
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a Python script to parse a directory of AWS CloudTrail log files (JSON format) to identify and output any unauthorized API calls (AccessDenied) grouped by IAM role.
#Python
#JSON Parsing
#AWS CloudTrail
#Security
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Given a list of dictionaries representing EC2 instances with keys 'instance_id', 'cpu_utilization', 'days_running', and 'tags', write a function to return a list of instance IDs to terminate. Terminate instances under 5% CPU for over 7 days, but never terminate instances with the tag 'critical'.
#Data Structures
#Filtering
#Automation Logic
Cloud Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a script that takes a Terraform plan output in JSON format and fails the CI build (returns exit code 1) if any AWS S3 buckets are being created without 'aws_s3_bucket_server_side_encryption_configuration' defined.
#Terraform
#JSON Parsing
#Security Compliance
#CI/CD
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available and scalable infrastructure for Airbnb's search service to handle massive traffic spikes during events like New Year's Eve, ensuring sub-second latency globally.
#AWS
#Kubernetes
#High Availability
#Global Load Balancing
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an immutable infrastructure deployment pipeline for Airbnb's payment processing service. The pipeline must ensure zero downtime, strict compliance checks, and automated rollbacks.
#Terraform
#Deployment Pipelines
#Immutable Infrastructure
#Blue/Green Deployment
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and observability platform capable of ingesting, processing, and querying petabytes of logs per day from Airbnb's global infrastructure.
#Logging
#Data Pipelines
#Kafka
#Elasticsearch
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Our AWS bill for Kubernetes (EKS) has spiked by 40% over the last quarter due to fluctuating microservice traffic. Walk me through your technical approach to diagnosing and optimizing these costs without impacting performance.
#AWS Cost Optimization
#Kubernetes
#Auto-scaling
#Spot Instances
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How would you design and implement a multi-region disaster recovery strategy for Airbnb's core booking database with an RPO of 5 minutes and an RTO of 30 minutes?
#Disaster Recovery
#AWS RDS
#Data Replication
#Failover
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle secrets management and rotation for thousands of microservices running in a large-scale Kubernetes environment?
#Kubernetes
#Secrets Management
#HashiCorp Vault
#AWS Secrets Manager
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
We are seeing a sudden, intermittent spike in latency between the 'Reservation' service and the 'Pricing' service communicating over our Istio service mesh. How do you troubleshoot this?
#Service Mesh
#Troubleshooting
#Microservices
#Observability
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Walk me through the process and challenges of migrating a legacy stateful application (e.g., an older MySQL cluster) from EC2 instances to Kubernetes.
#StatefulSets
#Persistent Volumes
#Migration
#Databases
Cloud Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
Describe how you would implement IAM least privilege access for a new microservice running on EKS that needs to read objects from a specific S3 bucket, write to a DynamoDB table, and publish to an SNS topic.
#AWS IAM
#Least Privilege
#EKS
#IRSA
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
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The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.