I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (Toronto, ON) in May 2015
Interview
First interview was with an HR person. Just standard questions mostly trying to figure out which data science team I would best fit in with based on my experience. I then got sent a take home challenge - it was an AirBnB data set which I was supposed to analyze and assess. The questions were fairly open ended. I was prepared for a machine learning type of analysis but this challenge was all about statistics. I don't know if this helps but this challenge was all about statistical modelling.
The interview process was fair and interesting. My only complaint is with the HR rep. They did not respond in a timely manner to any of my emails. I was emailed to say that they were interested in interviewing me. However to nail down an interview time I had to repeatedly email them because many of my emails were not responded to. I was told that I would be given the results of my take home challenge by Monday but having not heard anything by Wednesday I emailed to get the results. I have also been unable so far to get real, quantitative feedback. I have emailed multiple times but have not been able to get in touch with the rep. The rep was really not on top of my progress and I found this pretty annoying.
As a side note, I really dislike not being given feedback in the interview process. I spend a significant amount of time preparing for the process. As a courtesy if would be nice if the company would take the time to give me back real feedback.
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