The coding interviews at Airbnb are really challenging. The questions are difficult, specific to Airbnb, and cover a wide range of topics.
The good news is that the right preparation can make a big difference. We looked at a lot of software engineer interview questions that Airbnb job candidates sent us to find out what kinds of questions were asked most often. Below, weve provided a curated list of real example questions, including free solutions.
You’ll also find preparation tips and links to the best resources, so you can plan your study better and improve your chances of getting that Airbnb software engineer job.
Getting an interview for a software engineering role at Airbnb is no easy feat. As one of the most innovative and disruptive companies in the tech industry, Airbnb attracts some of the best engineering talent out there
So if you’ve managed to score an interview, congratulations! However, your work isn’t done yet. You need to thoroughly prepare if you want to impress the recruiters and engineers who will be asking you some very tough technical and behavioral interview questions.
In this comprehensive guide, I’ll share everything you need to know to ace your Airbnb software engineering interview I’ve done hours of research and spoken to engineers who have interviewed with Airbnb to compile a list of the most common and tricky questions they ask.
I’ll provide tips and model answers to help you craft winning responses. You’ll feel confident and know everything you need to know to ace your Airbnb interview by the end!
Why Interviews at Airbnb Are Uniquely Challenging
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of the actual questions, it’s important to understand why interviewing at Airbnb can be uniquely difficult compared to other top tech companies. Here are a few key reasons:
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Hyper-growth and constant innovation: Airbnb is a fast-growing startup that is shaking up the travel industry. They need engineers who can keep up with a fast-paced environment and products that are changing all the time. The questions test how well you can deal with uncertainty and work in a fast-paced environment.
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Emphasis on collaboration – Airbnb has a very collaborative engineering culture. Many of the questions test how well you can work with people from different departments and use different points of view to solve problems.
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Creativity valued – Unlike some tech giants focused solely on technical proficiency, Airbnb wants engineers who think creatively and can see the bigger picture beyond just coding. The questions aim to gauge this.
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Mission-driven – Airbnb’s mission to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere is central to their culture. The questions probe your passion for this mission and ability to build products that create social impact.
Keeping these factors in mind will help you understand what Airbnb prioritizes in candidates and allow you to frame your responses more effectively.
Most Common Airbnb Software Engineering Interview Questions
Now let’s get into the bulk of this guide – the actual interview questions you can expect. Based on extensive research and insider perspectives, these are some of the most frequent and tricky questions asked at Airbnb engineering interviews:
Technical Questions
These questions test your hard technical skills like coding, algorithms, system design, etc. Be sure to brush up on CS fundamentals before your interview!
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Coding/algorithms – You will be asked to solve a complex coding problem focused on data structures and algorithms. Expect questions on topics like arrays, trees, graph algorithms, dynamic programming, etc. Be ready to code out a solution on a whiteboard or IDE.
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System design – Design questions evaluate your ability to architect complex, scalable systems. You may be asked to design a core Airbnb product like search, payments, messaging, etc. Focus on scalability, reliability, and efficiency in your design.
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Object-oriented programming – Expect at least one OOPS based question. Brush up on concepts like inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction, encapsulation. Be ready to test your grasp of OOPS principles.
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Databases – Understanding core database concepts is a must. Review SQL syntax, normalization, indexing, transactions, ACID properties. You may be asked to optimize database queries.
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Testing – Testing is crucial for developing high-quality software. Be ready for questions on test strategy, techniques like boundary analysis, equivalence partitioning, etc. Know pros/cons of different types of testing.
Behavioral Questions
These questions evaluate your soft skills, mindset, and cultural fit. Use the STAR approach (Situation – Task – Action – Result) when framing responses.
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Collaboration – Expect questions probing your ability to collaborate across diverse, cross-functional teams. Share examples that highlight teamwork, inclusivity, and conflict resolution skills.
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Ambiguity and agility – Airbnb will ask about your comfort with ambiguity and ability to adapt in dynamic environments. Share how you’ve navigated uncertainty and driven positive change.
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Product sense – Interviewers want to assess your product intuition and customer empathy. Discuss how you’ve leveraged user insights to inform engineering decisions and enhance products.
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Mission alignment – Demonstrate your passion for Airbnb’s mission of belonging through thoughtful examples of how you’ve created social impact previously.
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Feedback – Share instances where you’ve given, received, or solicited constructive feedback to improve yourself, others, or the product.
8 Proven Strategies to Ace Your Airbnb Interview
With an overview of the tough questions you are likely to encounter, let’s look at some proven strategies to master your Airbnb interview:
1. Thoroughly research the company and role
Gaining in-depth knowledge of Airbnb, their products, business models, and engineering culture is a must. It demonstrates passion and preparation. Review their engineering blog and Tech Talks to understand their technology stack and projects.
2. Practice mock interviews
Set up practice interviews with friends or mentors to simulate the real deal. Get used to articulating your thought process out loud in a high-pressure setting. Ask for candid feedback on areas needing improvement.
3. Master CS fundamentals
Brush up on core computer science concepts like data structures, algorithms, databases, and OOP. Review coding challenges on LeetCode frequently. Being rock-solid on the basics is key.
4. Prepare stories and examples
Craft compelling stories highlighting your skills, mindset and values. Quantify your accomplishments. Practice narrating them clearly and concisely. Memorable anecdotes will make you stand out.
5. Research common interview formats
Understand the typical formats – case/design interviews, technical/behavioral interviews, whiteboard coding, etc. Tailor your responses based on the interview format.
6. Network with Airbnb employees
Talk to current/former Airbnb engineers on LinkedIn to get their interview tips. Insider perspectives allow you to anticipate questions and understand interviewer expectations.
7. Stay calm and confident
Interview anxiety is normal, but don’t let it affect your performance. Go in with the confidence that you have the skills and experience to excel. Stay focused on showcasing your capabilities.
8. Follow up promptly
Send thank you notes to reiterate your interest in the role and highlight why you are a great fit. Be gracious whatever the outcome, and request feedback on areas of improvement for future interviews.
Preparing for an Airbnb software engineering interview takes time and dedication. But thoroughly researching the company, practicing responses, honing your technical skills, and crafting compelling stories will set you up for success.
Keep the unique aspects of Airbnb’s culture and priorities in mind when framing your answers. Demonstrate your collaborative mindset, creative problem-solving ability, passion for the mission, and comfort with ambiguity.
While the questions will be challenging, have confidence in your experience and preparation. With the right strategic approach, you will be able to tackle any curveballs thrown your way. Stay calm, think on your feet, and articulate your thought process clearly.
You’ve got this! Use the guidance in this guide as a playbook to absolutely crush your upcoming Airbnb interview and land your dream software engineering role. Best of luck!
2 Practice by yourself
As mentioned above, Airbnb asks three types of questions during their interviews: coding, system design, and behavioral. The first thing you should do to get ready is to review these different types of questions and practice answering them on your own.
Airbnb hasnt published specific guidance on their coding interview preparation. However, there are some really helpful resources that have been published by other large tech companies.
For example, we feel that the Microsoft video below provides good general guidance for preparing for coding interviews. Just keep in mind that at Airbnb, your coding interviews will likely take place in a text editor on a computer, not on a whiteboard.
Here is a summary of the STAR approach recommended by Microsoft in the video above:
- Step 1: Situation: Make sure you understand the problem correctly. Write down the problem the interviewer gives you. Ask questions to make sure you understand. Agree on what the inputs and outputs are.
- Step 2: Write down your ideas for how to solve the problem and talk them out loud. Begin with a simple case and work your way up to a solution without writing any code. Think of different test cases that you can use for later testing.
- Step 3: Write clean code to solve the problem. Begin by writing clean code with clear variable and function names. Break up your code into modules with helper functions. Ask your interviewer before using a library. It’s okay to make mistakes and forget variables as long as you catch them early.
- Step 4: Test your solution and suggest ways to make it better. Run through the different test cases you made in Step 2. Take the interviewer’s comments into account when planning your next steps. Look at how time and space-consuming your code is and suggest ways to make it simpler.
Our coding interview prep article is the best place to start for the rest of your coding prep. It will help you through the whole process.
For interviews in system design, we think the steps shown in the Amazon video below will be very helpful. Again, this advice is coming from another company (i. e. Amazon not Airbnb), but the overall skills and approach should be transferable.
Here is a summary of what you should do:
- Step 1: Ask for more information. Know what the system’s goal is (e.g. g. sell ebooks) Establish the scope of the exercise (e. g. end-to-end experience or just an API?) Write down your performance and scale needs (e.g. g. 500 deals per second) Out loud, go over any assumptions you’re making.
- Step 2: Start with a big picture plan and then get more specific. Lay out the big picture parts (e.g. g. Front-end, web servers, and database: Design and build each part (e.g. g. Front-end first) Begin with the parts you know how to use best (e.g. g. (Front-end if you’re a front-end engineer.) Work with your interviewer to make sure you give enough information.
- Step 3: Put it all together. Go back and check that your plan meets the requirements. Talk about any trade-offs that came up in the choices you made. Finally, write down a summary of how the whole system would work.
You should also read our system design interview prep guide and learn how to answer questions about system design. These guides show you how to answer system design questions step by step and give you a number of examples with answers.
For behavioral interviews, we suggest that you learn our step-by-step way to answer this kind of question and then practice the most common questions that software engineers are asked in these kinds of interviews.
Finally, a great way to practice coding, system design, and behavioral questions, is to interview yourself out loud. It might sound weird, but this can really help you communicate your answers better in a real interview. You can ask and answer questions as both the candidate and the interviewer, just like two people would in an interview.
Interview process and timeline
Whats the Airbnb software engineer interview process and timeline? It typically takes 2-5 weeks (according to Glassdoor data), but could take as long as 8+ weeks in some cases. Below are the usual steps in the process:
Now that you know the big picture, let’s look more closely at the different steps of Airbnb’s software engineer interview process so that you can get a better sense of it.
Step one is getting an Airbnb interview in the first place. In this guide were focusing primarily on the interviews, so well keep this portion brief. You’ll need a good resume and cover letter that are specifically made for SWE jobs and Airbnb in particular.
Click here to see our free guide to optimizing your SWE resume.
Once you have your documents together you can submit your application. And if you can, it can be helpful to have an Airbnb employee or contact put you in touch with the hiring team.
Once your application is approved by Airbnb, then youll hear from a recruiter (usually through email).
When the recruiter reaches out to you, theyll often ask you to complete a HackerRank coding challenge. Not all candidates are asked to do this, but its pretty typical. The challenge itself is about 1-hour long, and there will be several test cases you need to pass.
If youd like to learn more about HackerRank, you can familiarize yourself with some of the challenges that are publicly posted on their website.
You’ll move on to the next step of the process if the recruiter and HackerRank challenge go well.
Youll face 1-2 technical phone screens with a peer or a potential manager at Airbnb. Theyll ask you typical data structure and algorithm questions which youll have to solve in a text editor.
If you want to get a better idea of the kinds of questions you might be asked during your Airbnb interviews, read the part of this guide that gives examples of coding questions.
If you make it through the first round, you’ll spend a day at one of Airbnb’s offices and have 4-6 interviews there.
You can expect about 2 of your onsite interviews to focus on coding questions (i. e. data structure and algorithm questions).
Youll also typically have 2-3 behavioral interviews during your onsite visit. When you go through behavioral interviews, they will ask you about both your past work experience and how well you “fit” in with the company culture.
Airbnb puts a large emphasis on these types of behavioral questions, so youll want to make sure youre well prepared for questions like “Tell me about a difficult project you worked on” or “Why Airbnb?”. Its also a good idea to familiarize yourself with Airbnbs mission and core values, which you can read about on their website.
During your on-sites, you may have a system design interview in addition to your coding and behavioral interviews. Candidates for all positions are expected to do very well on the coding and behavioral questions. However, if you’re applying for a junior position, the system design questions will not be as difficult as those for mid-level or senior engineers. You can learn more about system design questions later in this guide.
Finally, site visits usually last all day, so lunch will probably be part of the package.
After your onsite interviews, your job as a candidate is finished. You’ll then only have to wait to hear back from Airbnb before you should get your job offer.
The types of questions youll face during your Airbnb interviews can be broken down into 3 broad categories:
- Coding questions
- System design questions
- Behavioral questions
If you want to get an offer from Airbnb, you should be ready for all of these kinds of questions. So you can get ready, we’ve put together a list of interview questions from each group for you to work on.
Lets start with coding questions. Below weve compiled a list of coding interview questions. These questions come from Airbnb interview reports that were posted on Glassdoor. For each question, we changed the way it was asked to make it more like a Leetcode problem. We have also linked to a related free solution on Leetcode for each question.
Before you dive into Airbnbs coding questions, theres something else youll want to know. For coding interview questions at some tech companies, you don’t have to run your code. Instead, you can use general or “quasi-code.” But at Airbnb, youll have to write code that will actually run and also pass test cases.
Finally, read this guide on how to answer coding interview questions and practice with this list of coding interview examples along with the ones below.
- “Given a list of unique integer candidates and a target integer, return a list of all the unique ways that the candidates’ numbers can be put together to equal the target.” ” (Solution).
- “We are given an elevation map with heights[i] showing how high the ground is at that point.” The width at each index is 1. How many units of water are there at each index after V units of water fall at index K?”
- “You are given some lists of regions, and the first region on each list contains all the other regions on that list.” Find the smallest area that fits both of the given regions, region1 and region2. ” (Solution).
- “You have to come up with a file system that lets you make new paths and give them different values.” ” (Solution).
- It’s planned that each of the n jobs will be done from startTime[i] to endTime[i], making a profit of profit[i]. You are given the startTime, endTime, and profit arrays. You need to show the most money you can make while making sure that no two jobs in the subset have time ranges that overlap. ” (Solution).
- “Design and implement an iterator to flatten a 2d vector. It should support the following operations: next and hasNext. ” (Solution).
- You are given a list of unique words. Please return all the pairs of distinct indices (i, j) in that list such that words[i] + words[j] is a palindrome. ” (Solution).
- “There are different-value coins and a total amount of money given to you.” Figure out how many coins you need to make that amount with the fewest number of steps. If you can’t find any way to make up that much money with coins, return -1. ” (Solution).
- “Given a puzzle board, return the smallest number of moves needed to solve the puzzle.” Return -1 if the state of the board can’t be solved. ” (Solution).
- “There are n cities connected by m flights. Every plane costs w and leaves from city u to arrive at v. You have all the cities and flights, along with the starting city (src) and the destination (dst). Your job is to find the cheapest way to get from src to dst with as few stops as possible (k). If there is no such route, output -1. ” (Solution).
Airbnb Interview Questions with Answer Examples
FAQ
How hard is it to get into Airbnb as a software engineer?
How to prepare for an Airbnb interview?
How hard are Airbnb interviews?
Does Airbnb ask Leetcode questions?
What is the interview process for a software engineer at Airbnb?
Usually, the interview process for the Software engineer role at Airbnb consists of 4 rounds as under: LAUNCH your dream career! It’s an online test that candidates have to get through to qualify for the interview rounds. There will be 3 coding questions to be answered within 120 minutes. The difficulty level of the questions is generally medium.
What is the interview process like at Airbnb?
I interviewed at Airbnb (San Jose, CA) in Apr 2022 good but not know why fail. in the onsite round, there are four parts. two coding questions, one system design, one project part interview with the manager. all the interviwers are good, except the second one. I applied online. The process took 4 weeks.
How do I get a job at Airbnb?
If you crack the first round, the next step is to spend a day at one of Airbnb’s offices and to participate in 4-6 onsite interviews. You can expect about 2 of your onsite interviews to focus on coding questions (i.e. data structure and algorithm questions). You’ll also typically have 2-3 behavioral interviews during your onsite visit.
How much does a software engineer make at Airbnb?
Entry-level salary: USD 105,000. Senior positions: USD 257,000. Median salary: USD 165,000 with the base component being USD 120,000, stock component being USD 30,000 and bonus being USD 15,000. Usually, the interview process for the Software engineer role at Airbnb consists of 4 rounds as under: LAUNCH your dream career!
