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
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available and scalable infrastructure for Airbnb's search service to handle massive traffic spikes during events like New Year's Eve, ensuring sub-second latency globally.
#AWS
#Kubernetes
#High Availability
#Global Load Balancing
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and observability platform capable of ingesting, processing, and querying petabytes of logs per day from Airbnb's global infrastructure.
#Logging
#Data Pipelines
#Kafka
#Elasticsearch
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
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
•
System Design
•
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
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time feature store for Airbnb's ML models. How do you ensure consistency between offline training data and online serving data?
#Feature Store
#Data Engineering
#Stream Processing
#Database Design
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.
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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.