← Back to Directory

Airbnb interview notes, page 14 of 19

Large Enterprises

Most of these Airbnb write-ups come from Software Engineers (141), then Machine Learning Engineers (19) and Data Scientists (12). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (85), the system design round (47), the behavioral / leadership round (20) and the product sense round (13).

187 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Airbnb system design round for a software engineer role. The whole session was basically one big question about building a landlord dashboard, and it went pretty deep into data modeling, caching, and pipeline architecture.
  • Design a dashboard that lets a host see total nights booked and average nightly price across all their listings for any date range they pick, with the UI responding in under 200ms.
  • How would you handle the tradeoff between data freshness and query latency in this system?
  • Walk through the caching strategy you'd use for this dashboard, including how you'd handle cache misses and eviction.
  • How would you model the data to support both a per-host aggregate view and a per-listing breakdown without running expensive queries each time?

“This is where I spent most of the interview.”

View Post

Airbnb·Product Designer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Airbnb product design interview focused on a trust-sensitive payments problem. Single question but it had a lot of surface area and I don't think I handled the trust angle nearly as well as the UX side.
  • Design a payment collection experience for Airbnb that keeps trust intact between hosts and guests.

“I went straight into flows and edge cases and spent like ten minutes on the UI before realizing I'd barely touched the trust piece.”

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026
Coding round at Airbnb for a software engineer role. Had drilled a ton of practice problems beforehand, but the one question they threw at me was something I'd never seen, and the interviewer kept jumping in with hints the whole time.
  • Given a list of tasks with dependencies between them, determine a valid execution order (or detect if one is impossible).

“The only problem I hadn't seen before out of everything I prepped.”

View Post

Airbnb·Product Manager·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jun 2026
Short PM screen at Airbnb, basically just one question about the company.
  • What do you like about Airbnb?

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Airbnb OOD round for a software engineer role, one question the whole time: design a board game engine for a Connect-4-like game you've never played before. The emphasis was clearly on class design and extensibility rather than getting the rules perfect, which I didn't fully appreciate until I was already halfway through.
  • Design and implement a board game engine for an unfamiliar tabletop game with rules similar to Connect-4. Clarify the rules with the interviewer before starting. Walk through your class decomposition, core API, win detection strategy, and how the design supports future extensibility.

“My first instinct was to just assume Connect-4 rules and start coding, which would've been a mistake.”

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Airbnb coding round, one problem the whole time. It's a combinatorics-meets-data-structure question dressed up in product clothing, and I spent way too long on the naive approach before the interviewer nudged me toward something smarter.
  • Given a list of property listings, each with a set of available dates, and a desired stay range, find all pairs of listings whose combined availability fully covers the requested range so a guest could split their stay between the two.

“My first instinct was just iterate every pair and check coverage.”

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Airbnb software engineering interview that was essentially one long deep-dive into a past project. You pick the project, they pick it apart.
  • Walk us through a significant project you've worked on: the business problem it solved, your specific role, the system architecture, key components and data flows, major implementation decisions, and the challenges you ran into. How did you diagnose and fix those challenges, what tradeoffs did you weigh, what metrics changed, and what would you do differently looking back?

“This is a single question but it's really like eight questions stacked on top of each other.”

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Airbnb software engineer interview with a coding question around string formatting and ASCII table rendering. Pretty implementation-heavy, less algorithmic than I expected, but the edge case discussion is where things got interesting.
  • Given a list of sentences and a fixed column width, print each sentence as a row in a bordered ASCII table, with each row padded to the specified width and separated by horizontal dividers.

“The core implementation wasn't too bad once I started writing it out.”

View Post

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Airbnb software engineering interview with a fairly domain-specific coding problem around availability and date ranges. The problem felt deceptively simple at first glance but the edge cases piled up fast.
  • Design and implement an API endpoint that suggests 'split stays': given a set of named listings each with a list of available day-numbers, and a target date range [start, end], return all pairs (X, Y) where there exists some split day d such that listing X is available for every day from start through d, and listing Y is available for every day from d+1 through end.

“The example they gave made it look easy.”

View Post

Airbnb·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Round 3 of the Airbnb ML Engineer loop was a deep system design session focused on retrieval and ranking, and it ran long. They clearly care a lot about marketplace ranking experience, so if that's not your background, you'll feel it.
  • Design a user embedding and two-stage semantic retrieval and ranking system to surface listings a user is most likely to book, with the goal of maximizing booking conversion.
  • How do you handle position bias in a click-based training signal for a ranking model?

“This was the whole round basically.”

View Post