Airbnb interview notes, page 2 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

Apr 2026

Airbnb system design round, one big question on distributed key-value stores that basically ate the whole session. Dense topic and I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole with follow-ups the entire time.

Design a distributed key-value store that supports get, put, and delete on string keys with byte-string values, optional TTL, and optional compare-and-swap. It should scale horizontally to billions of keys, stay highly available, support configurable consistency, and keep p99 latency low.

“I started with the API surface which felt safe, but then they pushed immediately into partitioning and I jumped to consistent hashing before fully thinking through the replication story.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb software engineer screen, one coding question about URL parsing. Pretty straightforward on the surface but the follow-up discussion went in a few directions I wasn't fully prepared for.

Given a URL string, parse its query string and return all the query parameters as a key-value dictionary. Handle edge cases like keys with no values, URLs with no query string at all, and discuss how you'd deal with percent-encoding and repeated keys.

“The base implementation wasn't bad.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

Airbnb system design round for a Software Engineer role. The interviewer was a senior tech lead with a lot of experience and was genuinely engaged throughout. Felt like one of those rounds where everything clicked.

Design a job scheduler system that can handle around 10 million jobs, intended for internal use.

“This was squarely in my wheelhouse so I didn't freeze or fumble.”

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Airbnb·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a PM role at Airbnb and got hit with a risks question pretty early. Not a lot to report in terms of rounds or structure, just the one question worth sharing.

What do you think are Airbnb's biggest risks?

“I went straight to regulatory stuff since that's the obvious one, cities cracking down on short-term rentals and all that.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb SWE interview with a URL parsing problem that looks straightforward until you actually read the constraints. The mixed value types and non-unique keys are where it gets interesting.

Given a GET request URL, parse the query string and return each key-value pair as a Map. Keys may repeat, and values can be integers, strings, booleans, or lists.

“I started coding before fully thinking through the value type logic and had to backtrack twice.”

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Airbnb·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb ML engineer interview with a coding problem centered on text formatting. The core question was straightforward enough but the follow-up pushed into layout design territory I wasn't fully prepared for.

Given a string of words and a width W, implement a function that wraps the text into a bordered box with inner width W. Each line should be padded with spaces and surrounded by pipe characters on both sides. Words should only break at word boundaries, and short final lines should be right-padded with spaces.

“The box formatting part was fine, I got through it without too much trouble.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Airbnb behavioral round focused almost entirely on cross-functional collaboration. One big question, lots of follow-ups, and it went longer than I expected.

Walk me through a project you're proud of that required working across multiple teams or functions. What was the context, who were the stakeholders, how did you get everyone aligned, how did you handle disagreements, and what was the actual impact?

“This one sprawled.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb coding interview for a software engineer role. One algorithmic problem, classic unbounded knapsack flavor dressed up in a travel theme. Clean enough problem but the variant trips you up if you haven't seen it before.

Given a layover duration and a list of experiences each with a specific duration, determine if you can select experiences (repeating any as needed) so their total duration exactly equals the layover. Return a valid booking if one exists.

“I recognized the coin change shape pretty quickly, which helped.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026

Airbnb coding interview with a simulation problem that builds on a prior terrain-generation question. Pretty niche problem set, felt like they expected you to have context from a previous round.

Given a terrain heights array, a pour column, and a volume, simulate pouring that many units of water at the specified column. Each unit flows to the lowest adjacent position (left preferred over right), accumulating like real water. Output the final grid showing terrain, water, and empty air.

“This is basically LC 755 but they want you to build it from scratch in context of a prior terrain problem.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Quick Airbnb SWE screen with one of those icebreaker-style questions that sounds casual but probably tells them more about you than you'd expect.

What's something interesting you could teach me in just a few minutes?

“I blanked for a second and picked something way too technical, then halfway through realized they probably wanted to see personality not a mini lecture.”

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