Airbnb system design interview
Round 7 of 9 · 13 questions reported
- Length
- 60 min
- Format
- Design discussion
- They grade
- A complete schema and scaling story; at senior levels, at least one deep dive
- Heads-up
- Two rounds at senior and staff, the second deliberately open. MLE candidates get ML design rounds instead of one or both.
Questions Airbnb asks in this round 13
- Design a Slack-like chat systemJun 2026 · sometimes
- Design a distributed key-value storeMay 2026 · sometimes
- Design a hotel booking systemJun 2026 · rarely
- Design Airbnb's notification systemDec 2025 · rarely
- Design a customer support ticketing systemJun 2026 · once
- Design a personalized search ranking systemMay 2026 · once
- Design a distributed job scheduler
- Design a duplicate listing detection system
- Design a family-friendly listing ranking system
- Design a listing price suggestion system
- Design an ad click aggregation system
- Design an online chess game
- Design Google Calendar
About the Airbnb system design round
What does Airbnb ask in the system design round?
The most asked: Design a Slack-like chat system, Design a distributed key-value store and Design a hotel booking system. 13 questions reported in all.
How long is the Airbnb system design round?
About 60 minutes.
What is the Airbnb system design round like?
Design discussion. They grade: A complete schema and scaling story; at senior levels, at least one deep dive.