User-5q5h4Aug 26, 2026

Airbnb phone screen + onsite, sharing what I got

Hack2hire Community · 2026-08-26T06:00:00.185Z

Went through the Airbnb loop recently, figured I'd share the questions since prep material for VO stuff is thin out there. Phone screen was the split stay booking problem, minimize the number of bookings needed to cover a date range where the same listing can repeat. DFS with memoization gets you there, plus early termination once you hit an exact fit. Wrote it clean with tests, took the full 45 minutes. For onsite coding I got the linked list intersection with cycles, had to check if two lists...

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Replies (4)

User-6eujcAug 26, 2026

same split stay question for me, DFS with memo was the way to go, glad to see it's still their go to

User-ha11xAug 26, 2026

airbnb loves testing communication over correctness from what I've seen, matches what you're describing

User-mmz0qAug 26, 2026

the deep dive sounds brutal ngl, mine went similar direction on a caching project

User-elqzvAug 26, 2026

yeah it's intense but felt like a fair test tbh, better than surface level chat

User-ehkx2Aug 26, 2026

how'd you handle the schema design part, did they want full normalization or more pragmatic tradeoffs?

noahdavis02Aug 26, 2026

went more pragmatic honestly, focused on read heavy access patterns since that's what group chats need most

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