Airbnb Interview Questions — Page 5

Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Live code review exercise at Airbnb for a software engineer role, where you're handed a diff and expected to produce real PR comments with almost no guidance from the interviewer. Pretty revealing format honestly, since there's nowhere to hide.

You're shown a code diff live. Walk through how you'd structure your review comments, including what categories you check, in what order, and how you'd label severity.
Write out the actual text of a blocker comment, a suggestion, and a nit as you would type them on a real pull request.
How do you handle reviewing a change when you don't have access to the ticket, the surrounding codebase, or the author to answer questions?
The author pushes back on your blocker, saying the edge case you flagged can't actually happen in practice. How do you respond?
You spot a deeper design problem that the diff exposes but didn't actually introduce. Do you raise it in the review, and if so, how do you scope it so the PR isn't blocked forever?
How would your review approach differ for a junior engineer's first PR versus a staff engineer's change to a critical production service?
The change has no tests but looks obviously correct. Do you block the PR on missing tests, and where do you draw that line?

“The order thing tripped me up a bit.”

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Airbnb·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Airbnb's core values round for an ML Engineer role. Three questions, all behavioral but with real depth expected. The trick is they're not really three separate questions, they want a coherent narrative across all of them.

Why Airbnb? How does the company's mission connect to your personal values and your work history, and what specifically would you want to build or improve here?
What do you think is the biggest problem facing the world right now, and why?
What cause do you personally care about, and what have you actually done to support it? Concrete actions, time, money, advocacy.

“This is where most people fumble by giving a generic 'I love travel' answer.”

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

Apr 2026

Airbnb ML system design round focused entirely on one deep question about photo selection for listings. It was a long session and they really wanted you to go end-to-end, not just sketch a model.

Design a machine learning system that automatically picks the best cover photo for an Airbnb listing to improve booking conversion. Walk through the full pipeline from problem framing to serving.

“This one ate up the entire session.”

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Airbnb·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb data scientist interview that was basically a three-part gauntlet: a gnarly SQL panel-building problem, a rolling-window metric question, and then a Python DiD estimation task that went pretty deep into econometrics. The technical bar was higher than I expected, especially the fixed-effects stuff at the end.

Given tables for users, exposures, and orders, build a user-day panel covering a specific date range. Each row should include whether the user was treated, whether their country had launched yet, their revenue for that day, whether they were active, and how many days since signup. Handle missing user-days and avoid duplicates.
Using the panel you built, compute a 7-day rolling revenue per active user for two specific countries over a defined date window. Explain how you handle users with no activity and how you avoid lookahead bias.
Using the panel, estimate a two-way fixed-effects difference-in-differences model in Python with user and day fixed effects and clustered standard errors. Then: interpret the interaction term economically, test for pre-trends using leads, discuss late adopter and immortal time bias, re-estimate using a Poisson count model with an exposure offset, and give a 95% confidence interval plus a practical recommendation.

“This took way longer than it should have.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026

Airbnb software engineer interview with a graph optimization problem. Pretty involved algorithmically and I spent more time than I'd like to admit just making sure I understood what the scoring function was actually asking.

You're given a weighted directed acyclic graph where each node has a score and each edge has a time cost. Starting from a fixed source node with score zero, find the path to any node whose name starts with an underscore that maximizes total node scores minus total edge costs. Return the maximum value and optionally the path itself.

“The objective function tripped me up at first because you're mixing node weights and edge costs in the same sum, which feels a little unusual.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

Airbnb system design round, and they threw the full notification platform problem at me. Breadth was insane: APIs, queuing, retries, compliance, multi-region, the works. Left feeling like I'd covered maybe 60% of what they wanted.

Design a multi-channel notification system supporting email, SMS, push, and in-app delivery. Walk through the full architecture including producers, dispatchers, worker pools, and provider adapters.
How would you model user notification preferences, including per-channel settings, per-category opt-outs, and quiet hours?
How do you handle idempotency and deduplication for notifications, and what are the trade-offs between exactly-once and at-least-once delivery semantics?
Describe how you'd implement templating and localization for notification content across different channels and languages.
How would you design scheduling, retry logic with exponential backoff, and rate limiting including per-recipient throttling?
How do you track delivery status across providers and surface that data to upstream services?
How would you ensure multi-region reliability and handle failures in this notification system?
What compliance considerations matter here, specifically around unsubscribe handling and data retention under GDPR and CCPA?
How would you evolve this system to support A/B testing of notification content or send-time optimization, and how would you control costs at scale?

“I started with the producer API and worked outward, which felt right in the moment but meant I spent too long on the front-end contract before touching the queue topology.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Airbnb software engineering interview with a heavy focus on object-oriented design. Solved the problem and passed all test cases, still got rejected. Make of that what you will.

You start with one box in a house. Each box can contain keys, sub-boxes, and candies. Given this structure, find the maximum number of candies you can collect. Not all boxes require a key to open.

“The problem itself isn't too bad once you wrap your head around the recursive structure, boxes inside boxes with keys scattered around.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Airbnb coding screen for a software engineer role. One question, but it had enough layers to keep me busy for the whole session. Sorting, priority logic, and partial refunds all stacked on top of each other.

Given a list of payments (each with a method like CREDIT, CREDIT_CARD, or PAYPAL, a date, and an amount), a refund total to disburse, and any previously issued refunds against those payments, return the list of refund records that fully consume the refund amount. Rules: exhaust a single payment before moving to the next, prefer methods in order CREDIT then CREDIT_CARD then PAYPAL, and within the same method prefer more recent payments first.

“I got the basic structure pretty fast, sort by method priority then by date descending, then greedily walk the list.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Airbnb for a software engineer role. The problem was a full notification platform covering email, SMS, push, and batch campaigns at scale. Pretty involved question with a lot of surface area to cover.

Design a notification system at Airbnb's scale that supports multiple user types and delivery channels including email, SMS, push notifications, and an optional social channel.
How would you handle message templating and personalization so that notifications can be authored once but rendered differently per user and channel?
How do you manage user notification preferences, opt-outs, and compliance requirements like unsubscribe handling?
Walk through how you'd ensure reliability in this system: retries, deduplication, and idempotency when delivering notifications.
How would you design observability into this notification system, covering logging, metrics, tracing, and audit trails?

“I started with the two delivery modes since that felt like the clearest axis to organize around.”

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Airbnb·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Airbnb software engineer interview with a URL query string parsing problem. Pretty involved for a single coding question, lots of edge cases to think through.

Write a function that parses the query string portion of a GET URL and returns a map of keys to their parsed values. Keys can repeat (combine into a list), values can be integers, strings, or booleans. Quoted strings should be unquoted. Segments starting with '!' and no '=' are boolean flags set to true.

“More edge cases than I expected going in.”

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