Airbnb Coding Interview Questions: What the Coding Rounds Ask

Practice Questions in the Airbnb Style

These are practice questions, not leaked Airbnb questions. They match the style candidates describe.

• Merge overlapping bookings. Given date ranges for one listing, merge the ones that overlap. Then answer whether a new range is free.
• Parse a settings file. Turn nested key and value text into a map. Handle bad lines without crashing.
• Rank search results. Given listings with price, rating and distance, return the best ten under a filter.
• Split a bill. Given who paid what, return the smallest set of transfers that settles the group.
• Word or token grouping. Group items that share a normalised key, such as anagrams or cleaned addresses.
• A rate limiter. Allow a set number of requests per user per minute. Then extend it to several servers.

Notice the pattern. Each one starts small and grows with follow-ups. Write code that is easy to extend.

How the Round Is Scored

Candidates report that Airbnb weighs communication as heavily as the final code. Silence costs points even when the code works.

Four things help in every round.

• Restate the question in your own words. Confirm the input format before typing.
• Say your plan first. Give the approach and the running time, then write it.
• Name your variables well. Applied problems get long. Short names become hard to follow.
• Test with a bad input. Empty list, one item, a duplicate, a malformed line.

Common Reasons Candidates Fail

• Optimising too early. A clear solution that works beats a clever one that does not finish.
• Ignoring the messy input. The parsing part is the question, not a distraction from it.
• No tests. Walk through one example by hand before you say you are done.
• Going quiet after a hint. A hint is an invitation. Say what you now plan to change.

How to Prepare

• Learn the patterns behind the questions. Grokking the Coding Interview groups problems by technique, which is faster than solving random lists.
• Cover the highest value problems first. Grokking 75 Top Coding Interview Questions is a short list that covers most topics above.
• Get intervals and heaps solid. Booking style questions use them constantly. Grokking Data Structures for Coding Interviews covers the basics.
• Know the assessment format. Read what the Airbnb online assessment is like and how to prepare for the Airbnb interview on LeetCode.
• Prepare the other rounds too. See Airbnb system design interview questions and Airbnb behavioral interview questions.
• Practice talking while coding. Book a mock interview and solve one applied problem in 45 minutes.