It Is Not What It Appears From The Outside
It Is Not What It Appears From The Outside
Airbnb is no doubt a rocket ship. The culture is great; it breeds friendliness. Some of the smartest people around in Silicon Valley.
- Data Engineers are treated as second-class citizens.
- Blogs might give you the impression that there is fancy engineering or data science going on at Airbnb, but that is not true, with the exception of a few open-source projects. We have a hard time attracting top data science talent relative to our peers.
- Many managers are not technical enough to understand what we are doing, which leads to a bungled performance review process.
- Arrogant attitude that this is the best place to work and why would you want to work anywhere else. Not sure where we lost our humility along the journey...
- Lots of red tape; the speed and innovation at which things happen are extremely slow. Generally, people are risk-averse.
Return to the roots of what makes us great. Stop focusing exclusively on [something] and focus on innovation, and really re-thinking the travel experience. Treat all employees as if you are lucky to have them, rather than the other way around.
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Airbnb Interview Questions
Airbnb Interview Experiences
Data Engineer
Asked about data modeling questions: how to design different tables, how to partition data, and how to scale. Also asked to write SQL queries based on the previous questions. The coding interview asked simple coding questions, such as array manipulat
Data Engineer
Data engineering-centric interview questions. None of the LeetCode-style programming stuff. More focus is given to data architecture, which is great because that's what you end up doing in the job itself!
Data Engineer
Phone screens involved two recruiters, two engineers, and a manager. Onsite interviews included: * Three technical interviews * Two cultural fit interviews * One manager interview Everyone was nice, and it seemed like a good environment.
Data Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesNovember 21, 2025Asked about data modeling questions: how to design different tables, how to partition data, and how to scale. Also asked to write SQL queries based on the previous questions. The coding interview asked simple coding questions, such as array manipulat
Data Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesApril 1, 2021Data engineering-centric interview questions. None of the LeetCode-style programming stuff. More focus is given to data architecture, which is great because that's what you end up doing in the job itself!
Data Engineer
San Francisco, California, United StatesMarch 1, 2015Phone screens involved two recruiters, two engineers, and a manager. Onsite interviews included: * Three technical interviews * Two cultural fit interviews * One manager interview Everyone was nice, and it seemed like a good environment.
