I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in May 2018
Interview
Phone screen with the recruiter, another with one of the DS managers, and then a take-home which they give you four days to complete and expect a candidate to spend about eight hours on.
Getting tired of this general tech trend of making a candidate go through these long "homeworks" where the candidate is incredibly engaged, but there being very little effort from the company. Spent many hours on the homework, but was not accepted to come on for the final loop and received zero feedback on the work provided. Takes five to ten minutes to jump on the phone to give some feedback and suggestions. On top of that I had a DS from a larger tech company look at my work, gave a few small nits, but said it was solid work overall which just leads me to more questions on what Airbnb is even looking for.
Respect your candidates and try to put in at least half as much effort as they do when going through the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Homework was an end-to-end product question. Pretty typical supply/demand balancing for a PaaS company with a lot of data columns to do various segmentations on. Needed to provide a presentation for a non-technical audience and then a technical appendix for the data crowd to build on top of your work.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2025
Interview
Overall smooth interview process including combination of behavioral, coding, system design and research oriented questions. Through research oriented interviews you go through projects you have done and they ask questions about your work and then they propose an open problem and you should express your ideas. It is difficult to assess you performance on these interviews
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a simple encoding for a collection of strings
I applied online. I interviewed at Airbnb (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2024
Interview
1. Behavioral-style phone call
2. Simple data exercise screener
3. Virtual onsite. Several rounds, including a prepared presentation, and a 2-part data analysis exercise. I think I flubbed the SQL part of that. I was frustrated about the presentation though. The instructions said to take no more than an hour prepping it (ok lol) and to keep it VERY short, and NOT to go as far as, say, simulating data to chart. I felt like I bent the rules to fit in more info, ideas, analysis, how I expect the results to look - a bit like a grant proposal - and then I got dinged for not further breaking their own instructions and making it yet more in depth. Oh well, no one said this process has to be fair. So, word to the wise: ignore their instructions and make your deck way meatier!
On the bright side I'm glad they gave feedback about which parts of the virtual onsite I flubbed. They were friendly and interesting to talk to. It mostly seemed like a process at least vaguely aligned with their hiring goals for the role, which is honestly more than I can say for most interview processes!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you analyze the effects of a major change to their product if it were not possible to run an A/B test?
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
reached out by recruiter, first round is live coding interview in hackerrank with two questions, one on data transformation and the other is writing pseudo code to call preprocessing and a classification model object and calculate variance of performance metric
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
one column in data frame is a string such as [1,2,3,4,5], convert it to average number in int format