Engineering Manager interview
at Airbnb.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 What part of Airbnb's mission of belonging resonates with you, and how would you build a team culture where every engineer feels they belong?
2. 02 Tell us about a time you were a host to a struggling engineer on your team and helped them grow, and what the outcome was.
3. 03 Describe a decision you made based on instinct under a tight deadline, embracing the adventure despite incomplete information.
4. 04 Tell us about the product or team you led that you're most proud of, and how you scrappily acted like a Cereal Entrepreneur to deliver it.

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 How would you set technical direction and review architecture for a team owning Airbnb's booking and reservations services?
2. 02 Walk us through how you'd evaluate the tradeoffs of migrating a critical search service to a new infrastructure, and how you'd de-risk it.
3. 03 How do you balance paying down tech debt against shipping new guest- and host-facing features, and how would you communicate that tradeoff to leadership?
4. 04 Describe how you'd structure on-call, reliability, and incident response for a team owning a system in Airbnb's critical booking path.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design Airbnb's booking and reservation system and explain how you'd organize and staff a team to own it, avoiding double-booking at scale.
2. 02 Design Airbnb's listing search and ranking platform and describe the team boundaries and ownership model you'd put in place.
3. 03 Design a trust-and-safety and reviews platform, and explain how you'd coordinate cross-functionally across product, ML, and ops teams.
4. 04 Design the host pricing-suggestion system and lay out a phased delivery plan with milestones and metrics for a team building it from scratch.