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
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you noticed a data quality issue that was affecting downstream stakeholders, such as Data Scientists or Product Managers. How did you communicate the issue, and what steps did you take to resolve and prevent it?
#Communication
#Ownership
#Data Quality
#Stakeholder Management
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to build a data pipeline or tool with very ambiguous requirements or limited resources. How did you navigate the ambiguity and ensure the final product delivered business value?
#Ambiguity
#Execution
#Product Sense
Data Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given a table of user page views with `user_id`, `timestamp`, and `page_url`, write a SQL query to group these events into sessions. A new session should start if there is a gap of 30 minutes or more between consecutive page views for a user.
#Window Functions
#Sessionization
#Time-series Data
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a Python function to parse a massive, multi-gigabyte server log file containing JSON-formatted search events. The function should return the top K most searched destination cities in O(N) time. Assume the file is too large to fit into memory.
#Python
#Generators
#Heaps
#File I/O
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a `bookings` table with columns `listing_id`, `check_in_date`, and `check_out_date`, write a SQL query to find all listings that have overlapping booking dates (double bookings).
#Self Joins
#Date/Time Functions
#Data Quality
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Python script to fetch all reviews for a specific Airbnb host using a paginated REST API. You must handle rate limits (HTTP 429) and intermittent network failures gracefully.
#Python
#REST APIs
#Error Handling
#Pagination
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Calculate the 7-day conversion rate of users. Given a `searches` table and a `bookings` table, write a SQL query to find the percentage of users who searched for a listing and successfully booked any listing within 7 days of their search.
#Joins
#Date Math
#Conversion Metrics
#Aggregations
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Airbnb's API sometimes returns deeply nested JSON dictionaries for listing amenities. Write a recursive Python function to flatten this dictionary so that the keys are concatenated with dots (e.g., 'amenities.kitchen.stove').
#Python
#Recursion
#Data Structures
#JSON Processing
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to calculate the 30-day rolling average of daily gross booking value (GBV) per region. The output should include the date, region, daily GBV, and the rolling average.
#Window Functions
#Rolling Aggregations
#Financial Metrics
Data Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a real-time data pipeline to ingest availability and pricing updates from hosts and serve them to the search ranking model. The system must handle high throughput during peak seasons and ensure sub-second latency so users don't book unavailable listings.
#Kafka
#Stream Processing
#Event-Driven Architecture
#Data Consistency
Data Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design the dimensional data model for Airbnb's 'Experiences' product. Include the necessary fact and dimension tables. Specifically, explain how you would handle slowly changing dimensions (SCD) for a host's 'Superhost' status.
#Dimensional Modeling
#Star Schema
#Slowly Changing Dimensions
#Data Warehousing
Data Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a batch pipeline to compute the 'Superhost' status for all hosts on the platform every quarter. What technologies would you use, how would you orchestrate it, and how would you ensure data quality before publishing the results to the production database?
#Batch Processing
#Data Quality
#ETL
#Architecture
Data Engineer
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Technical
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hard
You are joining a massive `users` table with a `searches` table in Apache Spark. The job is stuck on the last few tasks and eventually throws an OutOfMemory error due to data skew caused by bot traffic. How do you optimize this join?
#Apache Spark
#Distributed Computing
#Performance Tuning
#Data Skew
Data Engineer
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Technical
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medium
You have an Airflow DAG with 50 tasks that process daily booking data. One task frequently fails due to an external API timeout. How do you design the DAG and the specific task to be idempotent and handle these retries efficiently without reprocessing the entire pipeline?
#Apache Airflow
#Idempotency
#Pipeline Orchestration
#Fault Tolerance
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
How would you implement automated anomaly detection for a critical data warehouse table that tracks daily bookings? What specific metrics or metadata would you monitor, and how would you prevent alert fatigue?
#Data Observability
#Anomaly Detection
#Monitoring
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
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.