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
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design Airbnb's Search Ranking system. How do you balance guest preferences with host acceptance rates?
#Learning to Rank
#Personalization
#Two-sided Marketplaces
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the Smart Pricing feature for hosts. What features would you use and how do you handle the cold start problem for a new listing?
#Regression
#Time Series
#Dynamic Pricing
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a Trust & Safety ML pipeline to detect fake listings or fraudulent hosts in real-time before they go live on the platform.
#Anomaly Detection
#Classification
#Real-time Systems
#Graph Neural Networks
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an LLM-powered system to automatically extract amenities, categorize listing descriptions, and generate a concise summary from unstructured host text and guest reviews.
#Large Language Models
#NLP
#Prompt Engineering
#Data Pipelines
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.