I got the call from the recruiter that I passed the core value round and have entered team match phase. I've heard AirBnB team match can take super long sometimes even 6 months, but I'm ready to get out of my current job, so praying this goes quick. AirBnB is a perfect fit for me, since being remote friendly would let me travel back home more often. In the meantime I figured I could share what helped me prep for AirBnB's interview rounds.
The coding rounds are super heavy on DP. I'm shocked that how many DP questions they ask since most other companies don't ask DP questions. And this is an area I was weak on so I focused a lot of my prep work on getting good at the DP basics and being able to implement it quickly. There's good resources for practicing questions by topics in posts like this: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7333827/the-pattern-based-approach-to-mastering-uwgbd
The interview process started with a phone screen which was a DP question that asked me to find the most cost effective menu order. I was expecting DP for any round and had already seen this problem on offerretriever during prepping, so this went as well as it could and I moved on.
The onsite coding round I was asked to find the best way for a group to split their stay in a neighborhood. I had seen this question before in the discussion section here. I didn't think the interviewer liked my solution, and he kept poking to see if I could describe a more optimized solution instead. I ended up only having enough time to code the suboptimal solution which passed all the test cases, and I could only describe a few potential ways to optimize it. I thought I may be in trouble after that, but luckily the interviewer still gave me a pass. I guess passing all the test cases was the important part.
Here are some airbnb style questions that are great to practice that I collected in my notes while practicing so also sharing it here in case it helps:
- Split Stay [I got asked this one]
- Minimum Number of Work Sessions to Finish the Tasks
- Min Cost Climbing Stairs
- Most Cost Effective Menu Order [I got asked this one]
- Find the Longest Valid Obstacle Course At Each Position
- Target Sum
- Partition Array Into Two Arrays To Minimize Sum Difference
- Maximum Sum BST in Binary Tree
The PR review round I didn't prepare for too extensively, just read some tips and did my best the day of the interview. There were 3 PR's to go through and I started by trying to find logical errors, since I assumed those were the most important, and then going back to do style/maintainability/nitpicks later.
For the system design rounds I practiced a lot with ChatGPT. A prompt style I like using for system design rounds is to ask it to give me a mock interview and then evaluate me based on one level higher than I was aiming for. In this case I was preparing for a Senior level role, hence I asked it to give me a Staff level interview and scoring. I found this super helpful because it will point out more areas in which you can score some points above your level, which helps with your final evaluation.
For behavioral rounds and the core value I didn't really do much special. I made sure I was familiar with the AirBnB values and that I had some stories ready to go that touched on those. Espically for core values, I found it helpful to have a few stories ready to go that touched on each of the values. They also asked how I contributed to a community or any volunteer experiences, which is not a typical BQ question so it caught me off guard. It would be good to prepare something for that if you have a core values round coming up.
Overall I found the process pretty similar to most companies, just with much harder questions in the coding rounds. To anyone who's in AirBnB, do you know any good teams that are hiring right now? Or does anyone how long the team match usuall takes? Does it really take mutliple months?
