I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb in Apr 2019
Interview
After resume and cover letter submission, I was asked to complete a Take-Home Challenge in 72 hours. I could choose the starting day/time of the challenge and was advised to spend 8-10 hours on it. I was later invited to a technical interview during which I would present my Take-Home Challenge work (35-40 minutes) and describe a past quantitative project (5-10 minutes). The final round consisted of two 45-minute interviews, a Hiring Manager interview during which I did a mini case and a cross-functional interview with someone outside the Data Science team to assess my fit with Airbnb's culture.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The Take-Home Challenge provided real, anonymized Airbnb data which I had to analyze to recommend 2-3 product changes in order to grow bookings in a particular market. I also had to rank my recommendations based on their estimated impact and send in a 5-8 slide presentation with main findings plus all of my code (in any programming language/software that I was comfortable with). The technical interview was a great conversation during which I presented my Take-Home Challenge slides, stated my assumptions, and explained major analytical choices. My interviewer asked extremely pertinent business and data questions which enriched my understanding of the issues and gave me ideas for improving my work. The Hiring Manager interview presented a mini-case for which I had to suggest a data solution to measuring the performance of a newly introduced feature on the Airbnb platform. The cross-functional interview was a very enjoyable conversation. Some of the questions included "Why Airbnb?", "Tell me about a time you changed a view you held", and "How have you made someone outside your immediate social circle feel that they belong?".
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in June 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