Airbnb Senior Engineer: recruiter call, CoderPad binary search, LLD and HLD loop
Recruiter
The first round was a call with one of their recruiters. It was quick ~30 mins and the main thing they asked me was about why Airbnb and their mission. I had read their mission and values page beforehand which helped and I highly recommend doing the same before this first call.
Technical 1
This was online and a live coding session on CoderPad where they asked a binary search twist DSA question. They expect it to pass all tests and they didn't give any help. Feels like they want to see how you think through the problem and wrestle with edge cases and how best to solve them.
Technical 2
This was a full loop style interview where I had 3 back to back interviews. The first was a LLD around building a Retriable Function. It was fine and was pretty easy since I was used to OOP style coding. The next round was a HLD where they asked me to design a hotel reservation system (essentially Airbnb). They obviously know it well so make sure to think of edge cases. But if you know the solution well you will be fine. The last part was about their core values so again make sure to know them well!
Culture
This was more of a team matching experience seeing where I could best fit with their current headcount and hiring needs. After a week I received an offer which I accepted.
5 comments
How much did the core values actually matter? Every Airbnb thread mentions them.
@Marcus Clark Real filter in my experience. The last part of the loop was about 30 minutes of "tell me about a time" questions, each tied to one of the values. If you can't map a story to a few of them it shows.
Retriable Function is a nice LLD choice, much more practical than the usual parking lot. Did they want exponential backoff or was linear fine?
Started linear, then they asked what I would change for a flaky downstream and backoff with jitter came up. Didn't have to implement it, just talk it through.
Did you get to pick the team or were you assigned?