Airbnb runs a long, cross-functional loop that is deliberately heavy on behavioural and 'core values' evaluation alongside the technical bar. Software candidates typically hit a recruiter chat, a technical phone screen with real coding (often modifying an existing snippet rather than a clean LeetCode-style problem), then a 4-5 round virtual or onsite that stacks two coding rounds, a system or module design round, a project deep-dive on the resume, and one or more culture/values interviews with non-functional interviewers. Non-engineering loops (PM, content, design) replace coding with a take-home or in-office presentation to a cross-functional panel of engineering, design, product and data counterparts, and add extra culture-fit rounds; recent candidates in London and India report unusually slow pipelines, aggressive resume screening, and late-stage rejections tied to a single 'red flag' in the values rounds.
These 8 writeups cover software engineering, site reliability engineering, mobile engineering and other roles, US HQ + London + India campus. 5 of them were posted under a pseudonym (Reddit, GeeksforGeeks or forum handles), so we could not verify the authors’ identities.
Typical rounds
3.51-7 range
Outcomes shared
0/5offer / not
Most common round
Phone screen
Sources span
2012 - 2026
Most frequently reported · Behavioral(6), Resume deep-dive(5), OOP(3), Data structures & algorithms(2), Debugging(2)
Airbnb’s official process
Airbnb's careers FAQ describes the process as 'both rigorous and fun' and says the exact shape depends on the position - it can involve a test, a video submission, or attendance at an in-person event. The company emphasises that candidates will meet with multiple people from the target team so both sides can decide whether the fit is right, but does not publish round counts or a formal loop structure for any specific job family. There is no dedicated 'interviewing at Airbnb' page on the current careers site.
Initial recruiter outreach and back-and-forth by email that set expectations for the SRE loop.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
2
SRE take-home challengeTake-home
A remote box was handed over with a typical systems-engineering problem. The candidate was free to solve it with any tools they wanted and used a mix of Chef, a few Ruby scripts and a shell bootstrap script.
Four-to-five hours of in-person interviews in San Francisco. A mix of Linux and tooling trivia, one algorithms problem with heavy interviewer hand-holding, and pointed questions about the candidate's opinions on specific tools (Chef, Puppet, Zookeeper). Ended with 'how would you improve Airbnb's site?' as an inventiveness probe.
Covered · Operating systems, Data structures & algorithms, Debugging
A qualifying call with a sourcer from Airbnb's three-person recruiting pod (sourcer, recruiter, coordinator) that set expectations for the loop.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
2
Hiring manager and PM peer callsPhone screen
Two phone conversations back-to-back with the hiring manager and a PM peer on the target team, mostly behavioural and resume-oriented.
Covered · Behavioral, Past projects
3
Seattle regional onsiteBehavioral
Three 30-minute in-person interviews at the Seattle office with an engineering manager, a designer and the hiring manager. Kept casual, focused on fit and background.
Covered · Behavioral, Past projects
4
San Francisco HQ presentation and panel dayPresentation
A prompt was shared a few days in advance. The candidate delivered a 60-minute presentation to a cross-functional panel of the product lead, design, data science and engineering managers, plus the full recruiting team, seated (not standing) and driving discussion off the slides.
Covered · Case study, Presentation, Past projects
5
HQ one-on-ones and skip-levelHiring manager
Two 30-minute follow-up interviews with panelists to dig into presentation decisions, plus a session with the hiring manager's manager (director of product).
Covered · Past projects, Behavioral
6
Culture-fit interviewsBehavioral
Two 30-minute sessions with people from unrelated functions whose only job was to assess whether the candidate was a cultural fit for Airbnb - explicitly focused on the person, not the PM skillset.
Covered · Behavioral, STAR stories
7
Additional PM leader culture callFinal
A 30-minute post-loop call with a product lead from a different area of the org. The recruiter framed it as a customary extra culture check specifically for the PM function once a candidate has passed the main loop.
A phone conversation with the recruiter or hiring manager to align on background and the role.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
2
Team-lead interviewTechnical
A phone or video call with the team lead or an existing content strategist, including craft questions such as 'what do you think is good content?'
Covered · Domain knowledge
3
Writing exerciseTake-home
A take-home writing task with a three-day window applying content strategy and UX writing to improve an existing Airbnb experience. Details were under NDA.
Covered · Domain knowledge
4
HQ onsitePanel
Onsite at Airbnb's San Francisco HQ, held in one of the themed meeting rooms modelled on real Airbnb listings. Behavioural questions ('what's the kindest thing you've done recently?') sat alongside content-strategy discussion.
A casual getting-to-know-you conversation with the recruiter covering background, recent projects, and interest in Airbnb.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
2
Technical phone screenTechnical
A live remote coding round asking the candidate to build a small iOS app that hits an API and displays results. The interviewer probed choices such as URLSession and Codable-based decoding.
Covered · API design, Testing
3
Onsite technical iOS roundLow-level design
Programmatic construction of a UICollectionView inside a UITableViewCell, with follow-ups on view lifecycle, cell reuse and Auto Layout.
Covered · Low-level design, OOP, UI programming
4
iOS architecture/system designSystem design
An open discussion on designing a scalable iOS module, focused on modularisation, MVVM, dependency injection and testability rather than diagrams.
Covered · System design, OOP, Testing
5
Behavioral / valuesBehavioral
A long, values-driven behavioural round centred on why decisions were made rather than what was built - handling disagreements with PMs, refactoring legacy code, and similar.
Covered · Behavioral, Conflict handling, STAR stories
Brief intro followed by a single coding problem in the family of grid-traversal/multi-source BFS (author flagged an Atlantic-Pacific water-flow style question), with the candidate expected to write and walk through the full code and analyse its time complexity.
Covered · Graphs, Arrays & strings
2
Projects and low-level designLow-level design
A project deep-dive followed by a system/LLD problem: design a vending machine that selects a product, accepts cash, returns change and enforces product expiry.
Advertised as a DSA round but in practice was not classical algorithm work: the interviewer handed over an existing snippet with multiple classes and functions and asked the candidate to add a new class and function on top. The candidate ran out of time on the 45-minute round.
The candidate cleared six interview rounds and reached the offer stage, including salary negotiations, for a role in Airbnb's new London office.
Covered · System design, Data structures & algorithms, Behavioral
2
Reference checksPhone screen
The recruiter delayed the offer letter and asked the candidate to chase former managers for reference checks.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
3
Additional staff engineer interviewBar raiser
The recruiter added an unplanned round with a staff engineer because 'another candidate was in the pipeline', with a mix of ad-hoc questions. Feedback afterwards cited a single 'red flag' in one answer as the reason for rejection despite passing the previous six rounds.
Process started in October and was still ongoing four months later after six interview rounds, with two to three week gaps between rounds and multiple reschedules. The recruiter said feedback was positive but never confirmed an outcome; the candidate felt ghosted between rounds.
Airbnb runs a long, cross-functional loop that is deliberately heavy on behavioural and 'core values' evaluation alongside the technical bar. Software candidates typically hit a recruiter chat, a technical phone screen with real coding (often modifying an existing snippet rather than a clean LeetCode-style problem), then a 4-5 round virtual or onsite that stacks two coding rounds, a system or module design round, a project deep-dive on the resume, and one or more culture/values interviews with non-functional interviewers. Non-engineering loops (PM, content, design) replace coding with a take-home or in-office presentation to a cross-functional panel of engineering, design, product and data counterparts, and add extra culture-fit rounds; recent candidates in London and India report unusually slow pipelines, aggressive resume screening, and late-stage rejections tied to a single 'red flag' in the values rounds.
What topics does Airbnb test in interviews?
Commonly reported topics include Data structures & algorithms, System design, Low-level design, OOP, API design, Past projects.
These guides summarize public, first-hand interview experiences shared by candidates. They describe the shape of each loop and the topics that came up, not a leaked question bank, and every experience links back to its original source. Processes change often. Treat this as directional prep, not a script.