I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Sep 2016
Interview
I was referred by a friend who currently works at Airbnb. The recruiter reached out to me two weeks later and asked if I would be interested in a different position. I said yes, and had a brief introductory conversation with the hr. The HR then asked for my availability for a take home challenge that needs 24 hours to complete. When I finally got the take home challenge, the instruction actually said the completion time should be within 3-6 hours. Not sure why there was a such a big time discrepancy. I completed the take home and was asked to come on site for a half day interview. I was sent the onsite interview with a different job title.. I emailed the recruiter back and clarified the position I was interviewing for. I was also told another position opened up and I would be considered for two positions.
During onsite I had breakfast with one of the team members, and then was given another data challenge to complete in 3 hours, followed by a presentation. There were about 5,6 people at the presentation. The afternoon after my onsite I was told I did not pass to the final round.
For the amount of time I spent on the interview process with airbnb, and despite being onsite (they have a beautiful campus and great food), I received little information about what they do in the analytics team. I (still) had no idea who the hiring manager was (maybe there isn't one?).. 95% of the communications were with the recruiter. People at the presentation walked in and sat down at the conference room but didn't introduce themselves (a little awkward...) in the beginning I asked everyone that came into the presentation their name, role, etc, but people that came in later I had no idea what their role was in Airbnb... During and after the presentation I answered a lot of questions, but had no time left to ask the team any questions. I understand things are moving at a fast pace at airbnb, it just felt like a whirlwind.. But the data challenges were pretty fun, and hr responded quickly to all the questions. 0
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
All questions are directly related to the presentation.
What does the gap represent in your graph?
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