Cross-functional rounds where product judgement is scored alongside code, plus a marketplace design domain.
Airbnb is known for a cross-functional round that is genuinely weighted: you talk with non-engineers about how you work, how you handle disagreement, and how you make product trade-offs. Candidates who treat it as a formality after strong technical rounds are sometimes rejected on it.
The technical rounds favour practical work over puzzles - building a feature, structuring a component, extending existing code. Design questions come from the marketplace domain: search and ranking over listings, availability and booking consistency so two guests cannot book the same night, pricing, and trust and safety systems.
45-60 min
Build or extend a feature. Structure and correctness over algorithmic tricks.
60 min
Search over listings, availability and booking consistency, pricing, trust and safety.
60 min
Deeper follow-up on one component of your design.
45 min
Working with non-engineers, disagreement and product judgement. Genuinely weighted.
Important enough to fail on. It is assessed like a technical round, with specific stories expected about disagreement, collaboration with non-engineers, and trade-offs you made between scope and quality.
Marketplace problems: search and ranking over listings, availability and booking so two guests cannot take the same night, pricing, and trust and safety. Double-booking prevention under concurrency is a recurring core.
Less than most big tech. Expect practical building and extension of code with emphasis on structure and correctness, closer to real work than to contest problems.
Practise the rounds Airbnb actually runs, and get scored on where you stand.