Airbnb Front End Engineer Interview Questions

Recruiting team seems very understaffed and overworked. When I was interviewing, it took them almost 2 weeks to get back to me after the technical screen, and virtual onsites. The recruiter also didn't seem to respect my time, often calling me without any warning with important info while I'm not available. They were also extremely unresponsive to my emails/messages. Airbnb was my first choice when I started interviewing, and it took such a long time that I found out about another compelling opportunity and took that instead. That being said, the interviews themselves were average difficulty, the company outlook seems good, the engineers there seem great to work with.

Recruiter screen followed by a Tech phone screen. I got a simple JS question dealing with hashmaps and arrays. I was able to code a perfectly working solution without any help. The interviewer kept making it tougher as I proceeded and I passed all the test cases. There was no back and forth and it was really smooth. Still, I got a reject which was confusing! I was reading through TeamBlind forum for Airbnb interviews and it has points on discrimination on ethnicity etc. It was a disheartening experience considering Airbnb was one of my favorite companies.

Round 1: Online coding challenge. About one-hour time limit, need to pass their test cases. Round 2: a 15 mins phone interview to go through your code in round 1. (If you are interviewing a full-stack role, they might invite you onsite. Or if you already have an offer, you can still discuss with them to ignore the second phone interview) Round 3: Another phone interview focus on front-end stuff, mostly javascript.

The interview process was smooth, I applied on their website and a recruiter reached out fairly quickly stating interest in my background and experience. I was thrilled and was quickly moved onto the phone screen stage. The phone screen went smoothly, the question was a rudimentary FE product request type of question to quickly wire up. Feedback came back within a few days and they invited me onsite in SF. They covered flight and a $400 coupon for AirBnB lodging, with expense reports to submit food and other misc expenses afterwards. On the day of the interview I showed up and was greeted by a very beautiful recruiter, she escorted me to the den where they conduct interviews, a small room with an iMac hooked up to the wall and a terrible keyboard and mouse. Interviewers came one after the other, and in my opinion they all went very smoothly. I felt like I knocked the FE coding questions out of the park as they were fairly rudimentary. I did stumble somewhat in the BE coding question and that threw me off my base a little but I felt like I rebounded decently well, producing a working solution to the problem set. I thoroughly enjoyed the cross-functional questions, as both interviewers were very polite and welcoming and allowed me to take the conversation anywhere. All in all I had a great experience and left their office hoping for/anticipating good feedback. The next working day I received feedback that they had positive signals but not enough to move forward with an offer at this time. They communicated that they'd be open to revisiting the process in 6-8 months but I'm sure that's the standard rejection template. I asked for more details, but the recruiter admitted to not being technical and stated that "code quality and execution" were stated as stopping points. My only take away is that the questions may be deliberately easy to test other coding skills that I wasn't being mindful of. I'm definitely dissatisfied with the result, usually I know beforehand whether I performed well or not, and in this circumstance I wish I could've received more detailed feedback to better understand where they felt things went wrong.

Recruiter contacted me. They asked if I wanted to go for traditional engineer role or frontend engineer role. I chose frontend. They scheduled the interview at my earliest convenience. First phone screen was in codepen and was to use any framework I wanted (jquery was loaded by default but I went with react) to implement a very basic frontend component. The task itself is easy but they were looking for how you might make it reusable and it was not conversational or collaborative. You can ask questions but you have to accomplish the task as fast as possible. Moved to a second phone screen which was on coderpad which was to implement a model that passed some tests. This was conversational and they even said I could google things. The task is easy enough and does not require google. You should know all your basics of javascript and should be able to implement every new feature without hesitation. If I could do it over, I would work faster, as the requirements of the second interview were iterative and it was unclear how much they expected you to accomplish within the time frame. The interviews both went well so hard to say what rubric they docked me on. Got the rejection email two days later with no feedback on why.

I worked with a recruiter that reached out to me via LinkedIn. Initially I wasn't looking to interview but after a few months the recruiter contacted me again and it was a better time then, so I gave it shot. The phone screens went really well and I thought the onsites went well too. However, the experience left me quite confused. Two days after the interview, the recruiter sent me an email with false hopes. The email read along the lines of "Let's discuss the next steps", then when we talked on the phone I was told that although all the interviews went really well, one of them wasn't excellent, and therefore they are sad to deliver the bad news. Honestly, I wasn't totally convinced that I wanted to work for Airbnb but I thought I'd give it a shot since the company talks so much about "compassion" and "belonging". l don't believe compassionate people use non-transparent language to communicate, and also I don't believe smart people value other people only on the basis of a single interview not being "excellent". Phone screen 1: HTML/CSS/JavaScript problem on CodePen Phone screen 2: JavaScript problem on CodePen Onsite: Three coding interviews, one lunch, two cross-functional, and one about your past experience working on a project. I liked that I was able to write code in CodePen instead of a whiteboard or any other environments where you can't execute code at all. Additionally I enjoyed the cross functional parts because it allowed me to be more relaxed. I thought the Frontend focused questions were pragmatic and realistic for the most part. I have mixed feelings about the one general coding question - the interviewer of this question was constantly pulling me in different directions as if he/she was trying to confuse me on purpose.

Smooth interview process, airbnb recruiter was super nice and helped me through the process. 1. Quick chat with the recruiter about the role and the process 2. Technical phone interview 3. Onsite with 2 FE, 1 CS, 1 Experience & 2 Cultural fit interviews - FE: fun FE mini projects on codepen with the choice of your framework (I used React) - CS: leetcode medium difficulty question - Experience: chance to really dig into a past project & what would I build in Airbnb - Cultural fit: chat about my values, interests and personality Although I didnt get an offer (one of my FE interview was all right) overall it was a great experience!

I was initially interviewed on the phone for 45 minutes. There was an issue with codepen, but together with the interview we were able to switch over to collabedit. The interview went smoothly and I was moved to the onsite. The onsite interview was in the San Francisco location. I was really excited to see the office, and showed up an hour early. Unfortunantly I didn't read the interview orientation e-mail close enough and spent most of the time in the lobby. The day started pretty well. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and I was able to snag a banana and a large glass of water. I was led to a small room next to the design department. The room itself was covered in carpet. The overhead light was out which seemed to bother everyone throughout the day except for me(pro-tip: don't make a "mood lighting" joke at and an interview). The first session was the cross functional one, I was paired up with someone from the marketing department. I have to admit I didn’t research this and was caught a bit off guard by some of them. I was asked what is the best gift I have ever given and received and that froze me. Eventually, I realized it was an opportunity to monologue and I ended up talking quite a while. The second one was also cross functional, but the interviewer was an engineer. I never really connected with the question, but we ended up having a very nice earnest discussion about career expectations. Throughout the day, one of the best parts was flipping the questions and getting the perspective of the interviewer Session three was a general coding question(sample included below), about finding a free slot given a list of schedules. We spent a short amount of time talking through it and I felt it would be best to code it to be better understand so I jumped right in. While my solution worked a bit different from what the interviewer was expecting, I had the impression that he was more or less happy with it. Lunch was impressive and I might have overeaten a bit. After lunch was the tour. That was my favorite part of the day. I had 15 minutes and as I got to see all the themed meeting rooms(they have modeled them after beautiful Airbnb listings) and big spaces full of cushions. There seem to be books everywhere, and I wanted desperately to just browse and see what people might read. The recruiter kept me moving, I wished I could have got lost and just wandered a bit. The next session was a project deep dive. I tried to explain a localization management project that I was really excited about. This one touched overall architecture and general technical setup. There was no feedback at the end of this one. The second post-lunch interview was the first web dev specific one(question included below), creating a autocomplete widget. I had implemented something similar during my last job and was able to complete the question. I asked for feedback and I felt like I had succeeded. They asked me if I had any questions about the engineering culture at Airbnb and I sheepishly admitted I did not. The last interview was also a web dev coding question(question included below), create a star widget. This one I started working with Javascript and CSS, but decided that I would try to come up with something a bit more impressive and go for a CSS only solution. I was able to get mostly there and with a few hints from the interviewer I put something together. I felt really good at the end of this interview and we were able to have time to chat. The interviewer shared a personal anecdote that was quite touching. This capped off what was an interesting day. Coming home I felt fairly confident in my chances. The turnaround was quick and I got a polite rejection, explaining I didn’t reach the technical bar. As the process was smooth and some of the conversations were really enjoyable(I wish I could have spent more time talking to several of the interviewers), it didn’t sting too bad. The biggest frustration was the delta between the phone screen and the actual in house interviews was not so large, but it seems like the expectations were much higher. Based on the amount of time and money it takes for both parties to have an onsite, I wish that the phone screen would have been a bit harder. If I could have, I wish I could have spent a little more time touring the office, this was my favorite part of the day.

I went through three rounds of interviews, two phone and one on site. The support team behind the interviewing process was delightfully helpful, setting me up with everything I'd need to be prepared for the onsite interview set (weirdly) in San Francisco. I only parenthetically say "weirdly" because to me part of getting an understanding of a candidate is doing so in context, and Portland is not very similar to SF in some pretty important ways. My onsite interview consisted of a tour of the beautiful facility and 3 tech interviews along with 3 non tech interviews. Each segment was about 45 minutes in length. The non tech interviews were refreshing, as I like to talk to people in different focuses to get a better gauge of the company. All of the interviewers were very likable, but a few seemed somewhat uninterested in being there. As someone who's spent a lot of time in the hiring seat, this was a bit of a turnoff. I know interviews take a lot of time and energy, but that's not the candidate's fault. Even though none of the three interviewers were front end engineers (all infrastructure), two of the interviews focused on matters I would say are well centered around front end development. I sailed through those interviews with ease. They were pretty simple. The other was more of a comp sci focus, around a somewhat simple (in hindsight) problem. I have a problem with these questions though, as they don't gauge anything except whether a person has run into this specific algorithmic problem before and how well they remember the solution. If the company wants a computer that can spit out the ideal algo solution to a problem with seconds , there's already a pretty good one called Google. Aside from that, determining a proper algorithmic solution to a problem is a research and test cycle that should and does often take a generous amount of time to figure out, well past anything one could accomplish in 45 minutes. One other gripe I had is that the recruiters said I should be as comfortable as possible so I should bring my laptop and set it up with my ideal stack and ide config, but when I actually got in, all of the interviewers made me use codepen, which is glitchy at best and very clumsy to use. So even after sailing through the front end questions and being well liked from a personality basis, I was still rejected because of my failing the algorithm question. It stings of course, and I feel Airbnb made an unfortunate mistake, but honestly, if they really want a frontender who can prattle off algos with the drop of the hat, I guess that's what I'll learn next.

Started off with a recruiter call and then a technical phone screen. On sites consisted of technical interviews and personality/fit interviews (including one over lunch). Everyone I talked to was really nice. In order to avoid bias, they don't read up anything about you prior to the interview so they can test your skills more objectively. The recruiter was really good at working with my schedule and planning around tight deadlines from other companies and my upcoming vacation. Overall, I thought the process went rather smoothly and relatively efficiently.