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Software Engineer Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
- Questions
- 546
- Companies
- 11
- Topics
- 8
- Languages
Showing 91–120 of 5874 results
- AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerCompute minimum-cost service cover
This question evaluates proficiency in combinatorial optimization and set-coverage with cost minimization, including handling case-insensitive service matching and enumerating minimal solution combinations.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerCompute split-stay listing pairs
This question evaluates the ability to manipulate interval availability data, reason about contiguous date ranges and split boundaries, and design efficient pairing algorithms with attention to time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerConstruct smallest number from I/D pattern
This problem tests greedy algorithm design and stack-based data structure manipulation to satisfy relative ordering constraints within a sequence of digits.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenGreedyStackStrings - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerCount Candies from Unlockable Boxes
Determine the maximum number of candies you can collect given an initial set of boxes, where each box may be locked or unlocked, contain candies, contain keys to other boxes, and contain other boxes.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenBreadth-First SearchGraphQueue - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerCount Consecutive Positive Integer Sums
Count representations of a positive integer as one or more consecutive positive integers, including the one-term representation. Derive the arithmetic condition for each sequence length and use a square-root bound rather than testing every possible starting value.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDefine a File Store with User Quotas and Compression
Implement an in-memory cloud file store that supports file creation, copying, prefix/suffix search, per-user storage quotas, and atomic file compression/expansion.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline AssessmentData StructuresDesignString - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe a cross-functional project you’re proud of
This question evaluates cross-functional collaboration, leadership, stakeholder alignment, conflict resolution, project ownership, and the ability to articulate technical and product decisions along with measurable impact.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe a flagship project’s architecture and tradeoffs
This question evaluates leadership and ownership along with system architecture and trade-off analysis, assessing competencies in end-to-end technical design, stakeholder communication, implementation decisions, and metrics-driven impact.
Behavioral & LeadershipOnsite - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDescribe your role, motivations, and values
This question evaluates a software engineer's communication, self-awareness, motivation, and cultural-fit competencies, along with indicators of leadership, teamwork, and clarity in scope and impact.
Behavioral & LeadershipHR Screen - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Multi-Level In-Memory Cloud Storage Service
Design a multi-tiered in-memory cloud storage system supporting staged uploads, capacity limits, prefix search ranking, and conflict-aware backup and restore operations.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline AssessmentDesignData StructuresHash Table - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Reliable Scheduler for Payment Jobs
Tests candidate's ability to design a mission-critical, fault-tolerant job scheduler for payment processing, focusing on lease claiming, idempotency, race condition handling, and reconciliation.
System DesignOnsitesystem-designdistributed-systemspayments - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a Stateful Banking System with Scheduled Payments and Account Merges
Design an in-memory stateful banking system that supports account creation, transfers, spending leaderboards, scheduled payments with deterministic backlog processing, and account merges.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline Assessmentdata-structuresheapsystem-simulation - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a Stateful Working Hours Register
Design an in-memory working hours and compensation tracking register that supports badge events, top-k leaderboards, scheduled rate changes, and interval-based historical earnings calculations.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline AssessmentDesignIntervalsBinary Search - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a banking ledger for deposits/withdrawals
This question tests your ability to design a robust database schema and service logic for a banking system, focusing on data integrity, transaction atomicity, and handling high-concurrency balance updates.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenDatabase DesignConcurrencyTransactions - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign a booking system
This question tests the ability to design a distributed reservation system that handles high concurrency, prevents double-booking, and ensures data consistency at scale.
System DesignOnsiteConcurrencyDatabaseDistributed Systems - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a dynamic rental pricing system
This question evaluates skills in production machine learning system design for pricing, including problem formulation, data and feature engineering, modeling and uncertainty management, online inference and scalability, experimentation and guardrails, and considerations like fairness and cold-start handling.
ML System DesignOnsite - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a fast host listing metrics page
This question evaluates backend system design and data engineering competencies, including scalable API design, time-range aggregation correctness (handling partial overlaps and state changes), data modeling and indexing, caching and precomputation, and performance validation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a group chat system
Airbnb's onsite system design round asks you to design the backend for a real-time group chat and messaging system: 1:1 and group conversations, near-real-time delivery, accurate unread counts, and full paginated history at roughly 1B messages a day and 5M concurrent connections. A complete answer covers the guarantees, APIs, data model and partitioning, write path and ordering, WebSocket fan-out and presence, offline delivery and multi-device sync, unread counts, membership changes, failure modes and observability. This walkthrough gives a corrected end-to-end reference answer for every part, including the trade-offs interviewers probe.
System DesignOnsite - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a hot-listing waitlist API
Design a hot-listing waitlist API evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.
System DesignOnsite - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a multi-channel notification system
This question tests the ability to design a distributed, multi-channel notification system capable of handling high throughput, varying latency requirements across channels (e.g., email, push, SMS), and ensuring reliable message delivery.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed SystemsScalabilityMessage Queues - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a real-time chat system with hot groups
This problem tests your ability to design a distributed, low-latency messaging system that handles massive fan-out and identify trending group activities.
System DesignOnsiteDistributed SystemsWebSocketsCaching - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign a scalable consumer feature
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design large-scale recommendation systems, covering system architecture, real-time serving and offline pipelines, personalization and ML modeling (candidate generation and ranking), data modeling/feature stores, caching and storage, monitoring, experimentation, and privacy/compliance skills.
System DesignOnsite - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign an A/B Testing Platform
Design an A/B testing platform with deterministic assignment, versioned experiment configuration, exposure logging, outcome attribution, and trustworthy analysis. Separate the latency-sensitive serving path from asynchronous metrics, support gradual ramps and overlapping tests, and detect bias, event loss, skew, and sample-ratio mismatch.
System DesignOnsite - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign an Airbnb wallet with holds and payouts
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing financial transaction systems, covering double-entry append-only ledgers, holds/authorizations and captures, refunds and payouts, multi-currency FX conversion and rounding, idempotency, concurrency safety, and auditable reconciliation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AirbnbEasySoftware EngineerDesign an In-Memory Cloud Storage Service with Users, Backups, and Restore
Implement an in-memory cloud storage system supporting user storage limits, globally unique files, ranked file queries, account merges, and transactional backup and restore operations.
Software Engineering FundamentalsOnline AssessmentObject-Oriented DesignData StructuresHash Table - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign an extensible request Retryer
This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design extensible and robust retry mechanisms, covering competencies in API/interface design, fault tolerance, backoff and jitter strategies, cancellation/deadline handling, idempotency considerations, and observability.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and implement Connect Four engine
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in algorithmic problem solving, data structure selection, API design, complexity analysis, and testing through implementation of a Connect Four game engine.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign and implement an Airbnb wallet
This question evaluates system design and object-oriented design skills focused on transactional accounting, escrow-based payment flows, idempotency, and robust error handling, plus the ability to produce a runnable in-memory implementation.
System DesignTechnical Screen - AirbnbHardSoftware EngineerDesign multi-currency pricing end-to-end
This question evaluates understanding of multi-currency pricing and payments, covering currency selection UX, storage versus presentation currency, exchange-rate sourcing and locking, rounding and localization, tax and fee modeling, caching and cross-channel consistency, and API and data-model design in a distributed marketplace.
System DesignOnsite - AirbnbMediumSoftware EngineerDesign mutable sum-tree with fast queries
This question evaluates proficiency in designing dynamic data structures for mutable rooted trees, including maintenance of subtree sums, parent/child link management, and analysis of update and query complexities within the Coding & Algorithms domain; it emphasizes practical application of algorithmic design coupled with conceptual understanding of invariants and amortized complexity. It is commonly asked in technical interviews because it probes reasoning about correctness and performance under mutations, handling edge cases such as subtree deletion and reattachment, and the ability to specify algorithmic approaches and complexity guarantees rather than implementation details.
Coding & AlgorithmsOnsite
Airbnb