I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2017
Interview
I had experience similar to some folks commenting here. After a phone screen with their recruiter, I got a take home for me to do in 2 days. It wasn't an easy one. Sorting out the data is ok, but it takes some time to knit your story out and put your insights on the slides in an organized way. Honestly, I liked their data set and put countless efforts on this exercise. However, once I turned in my work I was told game over and I got zero feedbacks from the recruiter. Not a word. I was really upset because I spent two days working on their stuff and they won't spend 10 mins on me.
I know now with the buzz of this company a lot of people want to join them. But for anyone who is considering going through their interviews, I sincerely suggest you think twice because they won't respect you as you deserve. You might spend tons of time on them and end up with mysterious doubt for yourself.
I'm a seasoned data scientist and I used to think take-homes are useful ways to assess the capability of an excellent data scientist, but now with this unpleasant experience I just think it can only distinguish if you have cheated with their internal employees and got the solutions.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Jun 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
