I applied online. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2017
Interview
I'm pretty disappointed with the interview process.
I had a call with the recruiter, then a technical screening which went well and allowed me to come onsite directly. The onsite consisted of 5 rounds and a lunch. 2 rounds were technical coding exercises. 2 were behavioral. 1 was system design where you can gloat about a previous project. I am disappointed about how unrealistic the time crunch is when conducting the technical coding exercises. Both of my questions required 2 pages of explanations. Since I was given only 45 minutes time to complete, and 15 minutes was literally the interviewer explaining the question to me (they insisted that this was the best approach), I was given 30 minutes to complete the problem.
The amount of edge cases from these problems were unrealistic to cover in just 30 minutes. So if you can code crazy fast, I would recommend that you do so and politely tell the interviewer to not talk. The interviewer just wants working code, so don't try to chit-chat with him/her.
The behavioral rounds are easy. Just drink that cool aid and you'll be fine.
Recruiter Screen (30m): High-level team and project overview.Tech Screen (45m): Simple coding question followed by a diffcult follow-up. Time is very tight, so implement the first part quickly and focus on making your code easily extensible for the follow-up requirements.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
An OOD style or implementation exstensive coding question. Logic is simple, no algorithm involved.
Pretty standard engineering interview. Recruiter call, technical interview, system design. They also had a code review interview that I had never seen before. I thought it was a little trickier than average, but not horrible. Sucks that if you don't move to the next round you can't reapply for a year.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about the tech stack you've worked with before
I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2026
Interview
Submitted my application and the next day i received the coding assessment I did not speak to anyone it was all done online, Im still waiting to hear back on my results
Airbnb interviews FAQs
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Airbnb with 3.4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 41% positive. To compare, the company-average is 44% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 21 days to get hired, when considering 197 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Airbnb overall takes an average of 29 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Airbnb as a Software Engineer according to 197 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 44%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 11%
Presentation: 8%
Personality test: 6%
Group panel interview: 5%
Background check: 2%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 1%
IQ intelligence test: 0%
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