Airbnb Interview Questions — Page 11

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

System design round at Airbnb for a software engineering role. The question was a classic chat system design but the scope they expected you to cover was pretty wide, from WebSocket tradeoffs to sharding strategy, and I felt like I was racing the clock the whole time.

Design a chat system that supports both 1:1 and group messaging at scale. Walk through your requirements, architecture decisions, and how you'd handle things like message delivery guarantees, online presence, and read receipts.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb SWE interview with a grid-based algorithm problem that started straightforward and then got a lot harder with the follow-up. The single-skier version felt manageable but the multi-skier extension is where things got real.

You're given a 2D grid of integers representing elevations. A skier starts at a given cell and can move up, down, left, or right, but only to a cell with strictly lower elevation. What's the maximum number of cells the skier can visit starting from a given position, including the start?
Follow-up: if you have many skiers each with their own starting cell, how do you return the score for each one efficiently without recomputing from scratch every time?

“My first instinct was DFS with memoization and that ended up being the right call.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb software engineer interview with a pretty gnarly algorithmic problem involving bitmask DP and set cover. One question, lots of depth expected, and they wanted full complexity analysis plus test cases on top of working code.

You're given a list of rental service packages, each with a set of services and a price, plus a list of required services. Design an algorithm that returns the minimum total cost to cover all required services (case-insensitive), and all combinations of package indices that achieve that minimum. If coverage is impossible, return (-1, []). Walk through your approach, time and space complexity in terms of N packages and S distinct required services, how you reconstruct optimal combinations from your DP state, and how you handle ties without duplicate combinations. Include tests for the provided example and at least one infeasible case.

“This is basically weighted set cover which is NP-hard in general, so the bitmask DP angle makes sense when S is small.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb software engineering interview with two meaty coding/design problems back to back. Part A was a retry utility in TypeScript and Part B was a cross-field form validation component. Both had enough edge cases to keep you honest.

Implement a higher-order function that wraps any async (or sync) function with retry logic, supporting single retry, N retries, and exponential backoff with configurable base, cap, and optional jitter. The wrapper should also handle per-attempt timeouts, an overall timeout, cancellation via AbortController, and filtering which errors are retryable.
Build a form component with three text inputs and a validation system where one validator checks each field's value length against a configurable min and max, and another validator rejects the submission if any two fields share the same value. Changing one field should trigger revalidation of the other fields to keep cross-field constraints up to date.

“This one took me longer than I expected to even scope.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb software engineering interview with a combinatorics/greedy algorithm problem focused on property selection by neighborhood and capacity constraints. Pretty clean problem once you see the structure, but the tie-breaking rules added some real complexity.

Given a list of properties (each with an ID, neighborhood, and capacity), a target neighborhood, and a group size, return the IDs of a combination of properties from that neighborhood whose total capacity meets or exceeds the group size. Minimize the number of properties selected, and among ties on count, minimize total capacity. Return an empty list if no feasible combination exists.

“The filtering step is obvious, sort the neighborhood's properties by capacity descending and greedily pick the largest ones until you hit the target.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb software engineer interview with a pretty involved tree problem that kept growing in scope. The follow-ups caught me off guard more than the main question did.

Given a binary tree where each node stores an integer and an array called target, determine whether target appears as a subsequence of the tree's inorder traversal. Elements must appear in the same relative order but don't need to be contiguous. Try to do it in O(n) time with O(1) auxiliary space by streaming the traversal instead of storing it.
Modify the tree so that its inorder traversal contains target as a subsequence. You can either overwrite the value of an existing node or insert a new node anywhere in the tree, and each operation costs 1. Compute the minimum number of operations needed and output that count along with one valid set of edits that achieves it.
Walk through the edge cases for both parts: what happens with an empty target array, duplicate values in either the tree or the target, or a target that is longer than the entire inorder traversal? Also state the time and space complexity for each part of the solution.

“The O(1) space constraint is what makes this interesting.”

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Airbnb·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Airbnb ML Engineer loop had a values-heavy behavioral segment that I wasn't fully prepared for. Three questions, all tied to mission and personal conviction, and they clearly wanted more than polished talking points.

Why do you want to work at Airbnb specifically?
In your view, what is one of the most significant problems facing the world right now?
What cause do you personally care about, and what have you actually done to support it?

“I had an answer ready but it felt thin the moment I said it out loud.”

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Airbnb·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb data science interview with a meaty experimentation question that felt more like a case study than a behavioral. The kind of question where you realize halfway through your answer that you're being tested on three different things at once.

A major feature launched globally without a holdout group and stakeholders want a fast read on whether to keep it or roll it back. How do you approach this, what alternatives do you propose, and how do you get skeptical PMs, engineers, legal, and marketing to align on a path forward?
How would you communicate uncertainty and statistical risk to non-technical stakeholders when there's pressure to make a fast ship or rollback call?
If the team culture were highly academic and passive, what would you do differently in terms of driving alignment and moving toward a decision?

“This one sprawled in a way I wasn't prepared for.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb software engineer interview with a pretty involved tree problem that had three parts stacked on top of each other. The algorithmic constraints made it trickier than it looked at first glance.

You have a binary tree and a sequence of numbers. Design an algorithm to check whether the sequence appears as a subsequence of the tree's inorder traversal, running in O(n) time with O(1) extra space. Then, figure out how to modify the tree so its inorder traversal contains that sequence as a subsequence, and find the minimum number of operations (inserting a node or changing a node's value each count as one operation) needed to do it.

“Three parts in one question, which I did not fully appreciate until I was already mid-explanation on part one.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Airbnb coding screen with one algorithmic visualization problem. Pretty straightforward premise but the implementation details tripped me up more than I expected.

Given an array of integers representing terrain heights, print a visual representation of the terrain where each column's height is rendered using '+' characters.

“Seemed easy at first, just loop and print some characters.”

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