AIRBNB · SYSTEM DESIGN
Airbnb system design interview questions
Mid-level candidates and above get one design round. Senior and staff candidates are judged on product-driven trade-offs (latency, consistency, user experience) and on scope, not on reciting distributed-systems vocabulary.
Which levels get a design round
| Level | Airbnb title | Design round | Low-level design |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDE 1 | G7 Software Engineer | Usually not | – |
| SDE 2 | G8 Software Engineer | Yes | – |
| Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) | G9 Senior Software Engineer | Yes | – |
| Staff Software Engineer | G10 Staff and above | Yes | – |
Design questions candidates report
-
Booking system preventing double-booking
Design a ticket booking app where thousands of people fight over the same few hundred seats. Requirements and scale, the booking API and seat data model, then the hard parts: atomic multi-seat holds with expiry, optimistic versus pessimistic locking, tying payment to a hold without double booking, a virtual waiting room for blockbuster releases, live seat maps, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Movie booking -
Host–guest messaging with delivery guarantees
A LADDER walkthrough of a mobile chat system: requirements, scale math for 20 billion messages a day and 200 million open connections, the WebSocket and REST API, a message store partitioned by conversation, then the deep dives: routing between chat servers, offline delivery and push, sent-delivered-read receipts, per-conversation ordering, group fan-out, presence, media and end-to-end encryption.
Full walkthrough: WhatsApp Practise on the design board -
Listing search by location and dates
How to design a proximity service like Yelp: requirements, scale math showing the whole geo index fits in memory, the nearby-search and business APIs, why a plain latitude and longitude index fails, geohash cells and neighbour lookups, quadtrees and S2 or H3 as alternatives, combining distance with filters and ranking, rating aggregation, caching, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Yelp / proximity -
Watchlist and notification system
How to design a shared notification service that any team can call: one API for push, SMS, email and in-app, user preferences and quiet hours, templates, separate priority queues so a marketing blast never delays a login code, per-provider rate limits, retries with backoff, deduplication, dead device tokens, bulk campaign fan-out and delivery tracking.
Full walkthrough: Notification system
Also reported
- Dynamic pricing suggestions
How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level
Questions people ask
When does Airbnb ask system design?
A design round is part of the loop for SDE 2 (G8 Software Engineer), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (G9 Senior Software Engineer), Staff Software Engineer (G10 Staff and above). Mid-level candidates and above get one design round. Senior and staff candidates are judged on product-driven trade-offs (latency, consistency, user experience) and on scope, not on reciting distributed-systems vocabulary.
What system design questions does Airbnb ask?
Candidates report: Booking system preventing double-booking; Host–guest messaging with delivery guarantees; Listing search by location and dates; Watchlist and notification system; Dynamic pricing suggestions.
System design questions at other companies
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- Meta
- Apple
- Netflix
- Uber
- Stripe
- Atlassian
- Goldman Sachs
- Salesforce
- Oracle
- Adobe
- Flipkart
- Walmart Global Tech
- PhonePe
- Swiggy
- Razorpay
System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions