Software Engineer interview
at Airbnb.

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

1. 01 Tell us about a time you championed Airbnb's mission by building something that made users feel they belonged, even when it wasn't the assigned task.
2. 02 Describe a moment you were a host to a teammate during a high-pressure incident or launch and helped them feel supported.
3. 03 Tell us about a time you embraced the adventure by volunteering for an ambiguous, scary project outside your comfort zone, and what came of it.
4. 04 Walk us through the engineering decision you're proudest of and how it reflected acting like a scrappy Cereal Entrepreneur.

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

1. 01 Implement a debounce function from scratch in JavaScript and explain where you'd use it in Airbnb's search filter UI.
2. 02 A React component re-renders twice on every state update on the listings page; how would you diagnose and fix the unnecessary render?
3. 03 Build an accessible, performant autocomplete component for Airbnb's destination search, handling async results, keyboard navigation, and race conditions.
4. 04 How would you securely handle CORS and request authentication for a frontend feature that calls Airbnb's booking APIs?

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

1. 01 Design Airbnb's listing search and ranking system, optimizing for a read-heavy workload while keeping availability data consistent.
2. 02 Design Airbnb's booking and reservation system so that two simultaneous requests can never double-book the same listing for the same dates.
3. 03 Design the frontend architecture for Airbnb's interactive search results page with map, filters, and infinite scroll, discussing SSR vs CSR tradeoffs.
4. 04 Design Airbnb's reviews system, including how guests and hosts submit, when reviews become visible, and how you'd prevent abuse.