I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 2018
Interview
I applied for the analytics DS position.
- Initial call with HR
- Takehome test
- On-site presentation
- Multiple on-site interviews
The process is very vigorous and quite energy draining; I was super glad when it was over as it took a lot of my time and effort. Proceed if you're willing to give this your full 100%, otherwise you'll probably won't make it.
The take home assignment can take a full 2-3 days depending on how committed you are and your willingness to explore the entire dataset. You'll be using a good chunk of your data slicing and dicing skills + your analytical skills. The point of this assignment is to see if your thought process aligns with what Airbnb is looking for.
The on-site presentation consists of your take home and a project you'd like to share from your previous work. The audience consisted of a bunch of data science managers.
Beyond the presentation, I had 5 interviews (2 culture fit, 2 with data science managers, 1 technical, and a casual lunch). The two interviews with data science managers were similar to the "technical" interview I had; metrics creation, hypothesis testing, etc. Culture fit interviews are self explanatory.
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
