Describe a flagship project’s architecture and tradeoffs

Q: Describe a flagship project’s architecture and tradeoffs

This is a Behavioral & Leadership interview question from Airbnb for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

Behavioral/Leadership: Deep Dive on a Significant Project

Context: Onsite software engineering interview. Choose one substantial project you personally drove or co-owned within the past 1–2 years.

Prompt: Provide a concise but complete walkthrough covering:

Business problem and why it mattered (users, revenue, risk)
Your role, scope, and stakeholders
System architecture overview (services, data stores, infra)
Key components and data flows (read/write paths, events, APIs)
Major implementation details (design decisions, testing, observability)
Main challenges encountered and how you diagnosed them
Resolutions and tradeoffs considered
Metrics moved (primary and guardrail) and validation approach
Retrospective: what you’d do differently

Guidance:

Focus on what you owned, not just what the team did.
Use concrete numbers (latency, error rate, cost, conversion) and timelines.
A rough sketch (verbal) of the architecture is welcome.
Target 5–7 minutes for the walkthrough, then Q&A.

Describe a flagship project’s architecture and tradeoffs

Behavioral/Leadership: Deep Dive on a Significant Project

Solution (Locked)

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