I interviewed for a few top tech companies eventually choosing Linkedin, and Airbnb was a bit different from all the others. The main difference is that they *really* care a lot about you using their product.
The interview has been described very well by their head of data science on quora. It is exactly like he says. Check it out if you got an interview there.
Firstly, a relatively simple A/B test takehome challenge, then a phone call with the hiring manager, then 1 day on-site working on a data science challenge and finally another day onsite to check cultural fit.
The interview is not too hard, I felt it was easier than facebook or linkedin. In order to pass the interview you need to:
1) Be very fluent in R or Python. Both challenges (takehome and onsite) aren't super hard, but they don't give you much time. If you are not super familiar with R or Python, you won't have time to finish them.
2) Get the collection of data science take-home challenges book and practice on it. The A/B test challenges there will help you for the takehome and the product-related ones will help you for the onsite.
3) Use the product extensively before. To solve the onsite challenge, you must know the product well and how it works. Otherwise, it will be impossible to even understand well what the data represents.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One A/B test takehome challenge, one onsite data challenge and one day for cultural fit.
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
