Airbnb’s interview process is really unique. It’s technically rigorous, but they also place a huge emphasis on your culture fit. The entire process feels similar to top tech companies like Google and Meta—it’s fast-paced, but with its own distinct flavor. The questions aren’t designed to be tricky, but they’re incredibly comprehensive, covering coding, system design, and behavioral skills.
I’ve combined my own insights with the recent experience of helping candidates nail their Airbnb SDE interview to create this complete interview guide.
The Airbnb Interview Process
Here’s a breakdown of the typical interview flow:
- Resume and HR Phone Screen: After submitting your resume, the HR team reviews your application and selects candidates for a phone screen. They often look for backgrounds in travel or e-commerce, or for engineers with experience optimizing recommendation systems. If you pass the resume screen, you’ll have a 30-minute call to discuss your background, what you’re looking for, and salary expectations. It’s crucial to highlight your project achievements on your resume and clearly articulate your career goals during this call.
- Online Assessment (OA): This is usually a 60- to 90-minute test on HackerRank, where you’ll solve two to three algorithm problems. Don’t worry, just practice medium-level LeetCode problems to improve your speed and ability to write code under pressure.
- Technical Phone Interview: Next, you’ll have one or two 45-minute phone interviews. You’ll write code on CoderPad, and the interviewer will watch as you type. It’s essential to verbalize your thought process as you go—don’t just code in silence.
- On-site Interview: This is the main event. It consists of four to six rounds that will thoroughly assess your technical skills and personality. The content includes multiple coding rounds, system design, and behavioral interviews. You might even meet with a senior manager. Stay calm, think clearly, and let your passion shine through!
Decoding the Questions
Airbnb’s interviewers stress that your code must be runnable, you need to be able to run tests, and you must be able to answer follow-up questions.
Coding Interview (Algorithms and Data Structures)
Round 1: The candidate was asked a variation of a weighted graph shortest path problem. It wasn’t a standard problem, so he had to adapt the Dijkstra algorithm. He got stuck on a boundary case, and his palms began to sweat. But he calmly worked through it with a small example, quickly realizing the issue was with the initialization. After fixing it, his code passed all the tests. The interviewer saw him calmly debug and nodded, saying, “Good catch.”
Round 2: In another interview, the candidate had to find a pair in an array with an O(n) time complexity. He initially wrote a brute-force solution, and the interviewer immediately asked, “Can you optimize this?” He froze for a moment, and the silence was a bit awkward. Then, he had a breakthrough and started writing a HashMap solution, instantly bringing down the complexity. The interviewer followed up: “What if the input is a stream?” This question tests real-time processing ability, and the correct approach is to think of a sliding window.
Another classic: Another question was a classic task scheduling problem. Given a bunch of tasks with deadlines and reward points, you need to complete them by their deadlines to maximize the total rewards. This problem is essentially unit task scheduling with time constraints, which can be solved with a greedy algorithm.
Airbnb places a high value on algorithmic skills, so don’t just practice basic problems. You also need to work on more difficult ones, like complex dynamic programming and advanced data structures.
System Design
This can be the most intimidating part of the interview for new grads. The student was asked the classic URL Shortener design question. He initially only thought about “writing a function to shorten a long URL” and didn’t consider the scalability needed for millions of users. The interviewer immediately followed up with, “What if there are hundreds of millions of users?” He quickly expanded on topics like database schemas, hash collisions, and distributed storage. This round ended up being a surprising highlight for him.
Another common question is to design the Airbnb listing search system. The interviewer wants to know how you would handle millions of listings and ensure both low latency and high relevance. A great approach includes using an inverted index to optimize search, distributed caching to reduce latency, and sharding the database to support scalability.
Behavioral Interview
This round can seem the most relaxed, but it’s also where people often trip up. Interviewers ask killer questions, such as, “Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.”
The candidate’s prepared example was a vague story about a disagreement over feature priorities with his intern mentor. When the interviewer pressed for details—”How did you specifically communicate? What was the outcome?”— The candidate clearly got stuck, and his voice got quieter. Our team reminded him to use the STAR framework: Situation, Task, Action, Result. As he went through his story using this framework, his logic became clear. He ended by saying, “This taught me how to use data, not emotion, to persuade others.” The interviewer smiled in satisfaction.
Culture Fit
Airbnb also wants to know if you align with their values, like being “mission-driven” and “being a host.” So, when you answer questions, don’t just talk about technical skills. Discuss how you collaborate, resolve conflicts, and use data to make decisions.
If you’re looking for more help, you can check out OAassist. They offer full interview support, including assistance with virtual on-site and proxy interviews, to help you ace interviews at top tech companies. You can contact them to customize your interview plan or get more tips and success stories.
Hope this guide helps you prepare for your interviews. Best of luck landing your dream offer!