I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Dec 2016
Interview
The current internship interview process is comprised of two remote rounds, an initial round and an "onsite" round. Both consist of an online coderpad environment (which your solutions are expected to compile on). Initial round is one 45 minute call, while the "onsite" round is two 45 minute calls.
Personally, for me the first round went fine, however the second round was particularly challenging due to both the technical questions asked and technical difficulties on both parties (first interviewer was almost 10 minutes late and second interviewer had trouble connecting via Skype, resulting in the interview starting 20+ min later).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Round 1:
Given a menu (list of items prices), find all possible combinations of items that sum a particular value K. (A variation of the typical 2sum/Nsum questions).
Round 2:
Given a flight itinerary consisting of starting city, destination city, and ticket price (2d list) - find the optimal price flight path to get from start to destination. (A variation of Dynamic Programming Shortest Path)
Given a list of sorted words from an alien dictionary, find the order of the alphabet. (Alien Dictionary Topological Sort - https://discuss.leetcode.com/topic/22476/16-18-lines-python-30-lines-c)
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb in Oct 2019
Interview
One coding challenge Leetcode Med-Hard. They there are 2 back to back interviews via coderpad video call. Then a culture fit. I didn't make it past the video coding interviews.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb in Sep 2018
Interview
Consisted of a 1 hour HackerRank, 2 back to back technical Skype interviews, and 1 culture fit interview. The HackerRank was pretty challenging and time constrained. I would recommend studying up on algorithms, keeping your composure, and planning out your thought process before typing as fast as you can. The Skype interviews were difficult, but not as impossible as some of the other stories I've read online. To study for this, I would recommend beefing up your knowledge on graph theory and studying traversals / search algorithms. The culture fit interview was a normal, less conversational behavioral interview. For this one, just try and be yourself and prepare like you would for a normal behavioral interview. Definitely doesn't hurt to prepare for questions you'll 100% get like "Why Airbnb?" and "What was your last Airbnb experience? How was it?"
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1 unique algorithm question, 2 graph questions (DFS and tree traversal), and all the normal behavioral questions
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in Feb 2018
Interview
Software engineering questions were all leetcode. Cultural questions were interesting. The systems design was a fun exercise. Their deep dive into the project interview is odd to me. Not sure what it shows to deep dive into it since people can fake it easily especially if they are quite the talker.
Despite all the mishaps on AirBnb's side, I got through the day. First mishap was that the first remote interview was cut off for about 5-10 mins due to technical issues and had to use the recruiter's laptop to continue. Second mishap was during the first coding interview, we could not figure out how to make the supplied mac mini work, so that delayed the interview schedule. Final mishap and the biggest, was that a lunch interviewer did not show up which caused a architecture interview to be canceled, which meant that I would have had to come in a second time to rectify that... Imagine if I had not come into an interview...
This is not the experience I expected from AirBnb under any circumstance. Interviews are stressful enough. I do not believe I would have come in for a second architecture interview had I been invited as enough of my time (8 hours) was used already and I have other onsite interviews.
