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
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Airbnb's core value is 'Be a Host'. Tell me about a time you went out of your way to mentor a junior engineer or make a new team member feel welcome and productive.
#Mentorship
#Empathy
#Team Building
#Core Values
Software Engineer
•
Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to 'Embrace the Adventure'. Describe a project where the requirements changed drastically halfway through, and how you managed the delivery.
#Adaptability
#Project Management
#Communication
#Core Values
Software Engineer
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Behavioral
•
hard
Describe a time you identified a significant technical debt or architectural flaw in your system. How did you convince product managers to allocate time to fix it instead of building new features?
#Influence
#Technical Debt
#Stakeholder Management
#Prioritization
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a string representing a CSV file, parse it into a 2D array. Handle commas inside quotes, escaped quotes, and newlines within quoted fields properly.
#String Manipulation
#Parsing
#State Machines
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a list of flights represented by source, destination, and price, and an integer K representing the maximum number of stops, find the cheapest flight from a starting city to a destination.
#Graph Traversal
#Dijkstra's Algorithm
#Breadth-First Search
#Dynamic Programming
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a time-based key-value store. You need to support `set(key, value, timestamp)` and `get(key, timestamp)` which returns the value set at the closest time at or before the given timestamp.
#Hash Maps
#Binary Search
#Data Structures
Software Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given an array of integers representing the nightly rates of an Airbnb listing over a month, find the maximum profit you can make by buying and selling a block of dates, with a mandatory cooldown period of 1 day between bookings.
#Dynamic Programming
#State Machines
#Optimization
Software Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a simplified version of a rate limiter that allows 'n' requests per 't' seconds for a given user ID. How would you scale this across multiple servers?
#Rate Limiting
#Sliding Window
#Distributed Systems
Software Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Given a 2D board of characters representing a map grid and a list of words representing points of interest, find all words present in the board. Words can be constructed from letters of sequentially adjacent cells.
#Trie
#Backtracking
#Depth-First Search
Software Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design the reservation and booking system for Airbnb. Specifically, how do you ensure that a single listing cannot be double-booked for the exact same dates by two concurrent users?
#Concurrency
#Distributed Transactions
#Database Locks
#Idempotency
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design Airbnb's search and filtering backend. Users should be able to search by map bounding box, dates, number of guests, and amenities with sub-second latency.
#Geospatial Indexing
#Elasticsearch
#Caching
#Microservices
Software Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design Airbnb's dynamic pricing engine. The system should ingest historical booking data, local events, and seasonality to suggest daily prices for hosts in real-time.
#Machine Learning Infrastructure
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Data Pipelines
Software Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a real-time messaging system between Airbnb hosts and guests. Ensure message delivery guarantees, offline push notifications, and support for image attachments.
#WebSockets
#Message Queues
#Database Sharding
#Object Storage
Software Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Design a GraphQL schema for the Airbnb Listing Details page. How would you handle resolving nested reviews, host details, and availability calendars efficiently without N+1 query issues?
#GraphQL
#API Design
#DataLoaders
#Performance Optimization
Software Engineer
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Technical
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hard
Given two tables: `bookings` (id, user_id, listing_id, check_in, check_out, status) and `listings` (id, host_id, city), write a SQL query to find the hosts who have had more than 3 consecutive canceled bookings in the last 6 months.
#Window Functions
#Data Aggregation
#Complex Joins
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.