I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in May 2017
Interview
Total Process from start to finish was around 3.5 weeks.
I had a referral and outstanding offers from two "big 4" companies so they did a great job of hurrying along the process.
Had two phone screens. The first was an interesting problem that's not currently on leetcode in any variant. I'd rate it somewhere between leetcode medium and hard. Barely finished it in time since I was debugging the last 15 min.
Second phone screen was a leetcode easy/medium problem. Trick is not overcomplicating it.
Onsites consist of several interviews: some are coding interviews, some are architecture interviews, some are fit interviews. Unlike other companies, Airbnb prefers a working solution in the allotted time even if it's suboptimal. Your code is expected to run. So I'd recommend taking no more than 10-15 min coming up with the algorithm... start coding up the naive solution if you're stuck and if you have time at the end you can explain a better algorithm to use.
The fit interviews are pretty straightforward. This isn't something you should "study" for, but read up on Airbnb's core values and think about how you align with them. They care a lot about fit which is probably why everyone seems so awesome to work with.
Architecture interview was much more intense than any of the tech giants. I found it to be highly disorganized but we basically did a deep dive into a system. If you're an experienced engineer you'll find it fast-paced but not terrible.
Experience interview is very pleasant. You talk about cool projects that you've worked on and how they work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
NDA (and I'm working there) so no specifics. But I strongly suggest studying graphs, networking, less common data structures like tries/radix trees and min/max heaps, bit manipulation, and searching (BFS, DFS, binary search).
Your thought process or partial solution counts zero. If you can't solve the problem, you will not receive an offer. Programming questions are tough so make sure to be prepared answering non-standard interview questions.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a string ip and number n, print all cidr addresses that cover that range - This is one of the problems that is out of left field.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Airbnb (San Francisco, CA) in May 2017
Interview
The interviewer jumped straight into the problem. It was basically a variation of coin change. Interviewer was not very helpful but definitely gave me time to think about the problem and wasn't too pushy. I got stuck in a recursive infinte loop because of the issue with including an item multiple times and not having duplicates. Shouldn't be too hard. Working solution provided.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q) Given a list of menu items and prices. Print all combinations that match a target price.
Eg: target = $3, Menu( A:$1 , B:$2)
Print
A,A,A
A,B
But no B,A