Data Scientist applicants have rated the interview process at Airbnb with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 28% positive. To compare, the company-average is 44% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Data Scientist roles take an average of 27 days to get hired, when considering 48 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 Data Scientist according to 48 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 29%
Presentation: 18%
Background check: 14%
One on one interview: 13%
Group panel interview: 10%
Skills test: 8%
Other: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
Drug test: 2%
Personality test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
I applied online in January and got contacted in March. The whole process took 3-4 weeks. I think the arrangement of the process is not very well organized, but it is understandable since they are moving so fast with their growth. The recruiter called me once at 7pm and replying email at night is quite common.
The take home data challenge take me around 8 hours to finish for both the analysis and the presentation while they said it should be around 3-4 hours to finish. I think this is a sign why I failed the onsite data challenge. The onsite data challenge is only 4 hours...I don't even have time... I think this is also what they are testing you about. Since their pace is so fast, they need you to get things done or at least report some useful insights given a short time.
Got rejected since I don't have much experience and didn't do the onsite data challenge very well.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
For the onsite data challenge, a question was asked regarding my practice of removing the missing values. What if it causes bias? What will you do then?
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