Airbnb Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Onsite and Core Value, Now Waiting on Team Match

I got laid off in the middle of last year, unfortunately. After that, looking at my mortgage, I felt empty and pessimistic for a while, then started grinding practice problems hard.

At first I used a bunch of small companies to warm up, but I was rusty and kept getting rejected all over the place — I was almost losing my confidence. Then I finally got an interview at Airbnb through a referral. Airbnb has genuinely always been my dream company, but I was so worried about getting rejected outright. It felt like a rocky process, I lost a ton of hair over it, but somehow I actually ended up passing the onsite and the Core Value round. I heard team match will still take a while, but I'm happy to come back and report.

Phone screen: I ground through countless interview-experience questions, but right off the bat they gave me a brand new question I'd never seen — a board game I'd never played, not the Connect4 that everyone always sees in these posts, but also a board game. The problem itself wasn't hard, the approach was similar to Connect4, just be careful about OOD.

Onsite:

Code review: The interviewer was very friendly, but there was basically zero conversation — he just turned off his screen and had me write comments on my own. I'd read a ton of interview write-ups beforehand, which was really helpful, and it went smoothly in the end. Besides posts here, there was also a LeetCode discussion thread that was very useful — it basically gave away the original question.

System design: The classic "design a group chat" question — you can basically reuse the approach for designing WhatsApp from HelloInterview directly.

Coding: Airbnb feels like a company where interview questions repeat a lot — not as many as Meta, but still quite a few. Since it's my dream company, before the coding round I basically read through every interview write-up from the last few months here plus searched the whole internet. If people are interested, I could organize all the interview questions I've collected and make a dedicated post to share them — I've basically written my own solution and test cases for almost all of them. What I ended up getting was the ski question. This one had been posted here before, but the description was pretty vague; I later found a more detailed version of the original question on OfferRetriever.

Because I'd already practiced this one, I probably answered pretty fast — I finished and realized it was too early, and ended up getting hit with several follow-ups. So my advice to everyone: even if you recognize the question, act like you don't and don't rush through it. One of the follow-ups was what to do if there are multiple skiers, which was actually pretty hard to answer. I honestly felt like the interviewer wasn't satisfied with my answer, but thankfully I still passed.

Experience/BQ: Standard behavioral questions, but they really dug into the projects in detail. There was one old project where I'd only written a single line about it on my resume, and they still asked me about it. My takeaway: anything you put on your resume, you absolutely need to know cold.

Core Value: The culture-fit round, scheduled only after passing the onsite. This round was pretty easy to pass — the interviewer was really nice, and the conversation was relaxed and fun. He actually said he'd run through all his questions after just 20 minutes and ended it early. I was a little worried about it ending early, but I also felt like the conversation had genuinely gone well, and the result for this round came back miraculously fast.

That said, even though all the interviewers were genuinely nice, I do want to complain a little: Airbnb's interview process is really, really long. In the middle of it, the recruiter kept disappearing on me! A lot of the time when I emailed with a question, I wouldn't get a reply for a week, and waiting for results was painful. At one point I almost had a mental breakdown and was about to accept an offer from another company instead. In the end I just held on through sheer willpower and finally made it through. Hoping team match goes smoothly. I've seen people here say team match usually takes forever — does anyone know if there's new headcount this year, and whether it might be faster than it was at the end of last year?

Edit (2026-03-06): Looking at the replies, it seems people are pretty interested in a question bank. I'll try to organize my notes plus my own written solutions over the weekend and put up a dedicated post to share them.

Also, adding a detail on the phone screen question: roughly, you're given the state of a maze game, and you compute a score based on the maze — the scoring is actually kind of like a shortest-path problem. I looked it up and it seems pretty similar to a LeetCode problem called Shortest Path in Binary Matrix.

Edit (2026-03-06): Besides the phone screen, let me also add more on the ski question — I couldn't find the details here before, but I found a fairly detailed version of the original question on OfferRetriever. I'd recommend also preparing an answer for the multiple-skiers follow-up, since I got stuck on that one for a while. When you first write your solution, try to design it so it's easy to extend to multiple skiers from the start.