I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb
Interview
Recruiter reaches out to me to set up a time to talk. The recruiter neglected to call me at that time. I send them a follow up email 30 minutes afterwards saying I didn't receive a call. No response. I send another follow up email a week later asking about rescheduling the call. The recruiter says that she mixed up her schedule, but she said she sent a follow up email asking to reschedule the call afterwards, which for some reason I didn't get. Either way, I end up speaking with her and setting up a phone interview.
The engineer I spoke with didn't speak much and was difficult to communicate with. The problem I was given involved a bunch of ugly string data parsing and using a heuristic to modify the data in a certain way. It was an easy problem, but they wanted a fully working solution within the short time limit. I couldn't finish it in time. Pick a language that has as little verbosity as possible and don't bother engaging with the interviewer because they don't care to speak with you. They just want to see how fast you can code.
There are a lot of companies that are known to have a selective interview process, in order to maintain their reputation as a desirable company to work for that is difficult to get into. Most of these companies ask difficult problems to test your capabilities, but Airbnb is essentially just applying an arbitrary filter to weed out the large number of applicants to each position. It sounds like they mostly just care about culture fit anyways from what I've heard about the onsite interview process. For a company that touts their core values and host-like nature, I find it hilarious that this is the worst interview experience I've ever had.
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Airbnb in Mar 2026
Interview
Had hiring manager call but got reject after the interview. The interview was around my past experience in the current company. Talked about how I influence roadmap, handle escalations and architect team’s initiatives,