Airbnb Data Science interview questions

One of the toughest, most intensive process. Go through the interview only if you are not busy or overwhelmed by any other parts of life (school/work) because you can expect to dedicate all your free time to this process for at least a month. The interview basically becomes a full time job on its own. If you go through the entire process including onsites, chances are that you will be burned out. You first start with a phone screen, which is pretty basic. Then they give you a take home challenge. Like other reviews, it is time consuming. They tell you to spend no more than a few hours, but also ask you to perform full stack analytics: data cleaning, exploration, derive insights, and put together a PowerPoint deck. I’m sure this project would take a team of full time data scientist one week to complete with the high standards they’ll be evaluating you against. Be prepared to dedicate your weekend to this. When you finally make it onsite, they want you to prepare another deck for a past project and present it, as well as presenting your take home. More time spent preparing decks in addition to preparing for behaviorals, metrics, AirBNB business model, etc. You’ll be there for pretty much the entire day, and meet ~6 people, which is extremely exhausting. Every other company only brings you onsite for half a day and meet half the number of people. The people I met are very bright and smart, but I had the impression that the case questions they throw at you are problems that they currently face and don’t even have a solution to. So it seemed a little unfair that they expect someone who doesn’t think about airbnb’s Problems on a daily basis to figure out the answer that I don’t even think they know.

There was a phone screen followed by a take-home tech screen. After turning in the tech screen, you either proceed to in-person interviews or not. The DS org is somewhat chaotic (hiring new managers), but the recruiter made the process run smoothly.