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
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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
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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.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.