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
•
System Design
•
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
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
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.