AirBnb | SSE | Rejected
Interview Experience
I had applied on the Airbnb career portal, was contacted by an Airbnb recruiter after a couple weeks. They screen candidates through an online assessment. Online Assesment: It was Hackerrank test,...
Full Details
I had applied on the Airbnb career portal, was contacted by an Airbnb recruiter after a couple weeks. They screen candidates through an online assessment.
Online Assesment: It was Hackerrank test, had just 1 question. It was a graph based problem. I don\'t remember exactly what it was.
My solution gave TLE for 1 test-case and
passed the remaining test-cases.
I was invitied for further rounds. There were 2 coding rounds (45 mins each) and 1 design round (about 60 mins).
Round1 (45-min): Find minimum window in a string containing all characters from a given pattern: https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring/
I suggested a brute force approach first, with some hints I was able to come up with an optimal solution but my code had some bugs.
Round2 (45 mins): Sliding puzzle similar to this: https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-puzzle/
I started with a DFS based approach which is sub-optimal for this question. Then moved to BFS based approach which was a better solution. The interviewer pointed out a couple of errors in my code.
Round 3 (System design, 1 hr): You are getting current weather data at periodic intervals from multiple sub-stations within a country. Each sub-station will give you the weather data for its region, they had given the format of data that the sub-stations send. Build a system to fetch historical data and also given predictions about the future weather for a given region. They wanted the high-level design. Sorry if the question seems vague, I might have forgotten some details.
Verdict
Rejected due to coding round. They expect an optimal solution with not too much hints.
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a airbnb interview for a swe role during the oa round reported in 2022.
It covers the following topics: Graph, System Design, Queue, Strings .
Topics
More Airbnb Interview Questions
About Airbnb Interview Reports
This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Airbnb. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Airbnb are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Airbnb interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Airbnb reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Airbnb Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Airbnb reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.