Airbnb Coding Interview Questions
32 Airbnb coding interview problems with full optimal solutions — 1 easy, 20 medium, 11 hard. Every problem ships with multiple approaches (brute-force first, then the optimal), complexity tables for each, company-specific tips on what an Airbnb interviewer values, and a FAQ section.
- #4hardfoundational
4. Median of Two Sorted Arrays
Find the exact midpoint of two sorted price lists without merging them — Airbnb's dynamic pricing engine computes real-time median nightly rates across two independently sorted market segments to anchor smart pricing recommendations for hosts.
- #23hardfoundational
23. Merge K Sorted Lists
Combine k sorted ranking feeds into one unified result — Airbnb's search infrastructure merges sorted candidate lists from neighborhood, price, and availability shards into a single ranked page of listings.
- #49mediumfoundational
49. Group Anagrams
Cluster words that are rearrangements of each other — Airbnb's search team applies this hash-map grouping pattern to deduplicate listing titles that differ only in word order, surfacing canonical results to guests.
- #56mediumfoundational
56. Merge Intervals
Collapse overlapping date ranges into clean availability windows — the exact interval-merge logic Airbnb's calendar engine runs every time a host blocks dates or a guest extends a stay.
- #57mediumfoundational
57. Insert Interval
Splice a new booking into a sorted availability list without disturbing existing reservations — Airbnb's calendar service does this on every Instant Book confirmation that lands between two blocked windows.
- #78mediumfoundational
78. Subsets
Generate every combination of amenities a listing can offer — Airbnb's search filter engine enumerates amenity subsets to build exhaustive filter option sets for features like pool plus wifi plus kitchen on the host settings page.
- #200mediumfoundational
200. Number of Islands
Count connected land clusters on a grid map — Airbnb's geo-clustering engine uses the same connected-components logic to group nearby listings into distinct neighborhood zones for the search map view.
- #238mediumfoundational
238. Product of Array Except Self
Compute each element's contribution without knowing the whole product — Airbnb's pricing engine uses leave-one-out multiplications when computing the relative impact of a single listing's price on an aggregated market signal.
- #253mediumfoundational
253. Meeting Rooms II
Find the minimum number of rooms needed for overlapping meetings — Airbnb applies this directly to host-support queues, determining how many concierge agents must be on-call during peak booking hours.
- #355mediumfoundational
355. Design Twitter
Build a follow graph with a merged activity feed — Airbnb's host-community product uses an identical follow/feed design to let guests subscribe to hosts and see their latest listings, reviews, and availability updates.
- #621mediumfoundational
621. Task Scheduler
Minimize total time when identical tasks must cool down between runs — Airbnb's host-onboarding pipeline applies this cooling-period logic to ensure the same verification job does not re-run on the same listing until a mandatory review window has passed.
- #1094mediumfoundational
1094. Car Pooling
Check whether a shared vehicle ever exceeds capacity across multiple pickup-dropoff trips — Airbnb's Trips team applies this interval-difference-array pattern to validate that shared shuttles to airports never overbook across overlapping passenger legs.
- #10hardless common
10. Regular Expression Matching
Implement regex matching with '.' (any single char) and '*' (zero or more). Airbnb asks this to test whether you can write the 2D DP recurrence and articulate why memoization beats raw recursion.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #44hardfrequently asked
44. Wildcard Matching
Match a string against a pattern with '?' (any single char) and '*' (any sequence including empty). Airbnb asks this to test 2D DP plus the greedy two-pointer optimization that beats it on space.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #68hardcompany favorite
68. Text Justification
Given words and maxWidth, format text so each line is exactly maxWidth chars with full justification (even space distribution). Airbnb asks this to test careful index bookkeeping and the last-line + single-word edge cases.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #76hardfrequently asked
76. Minimum Window Substring
Find the smallest substring of s that contains every char of t with multiplicities. Airbnb asks this to test the canonical sliding-window template with need/have counts and a 'formed' counter.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #125easyfoundational
125. Valid Palindrome
After lowercasing and removing non-alphanumeric chars, is the string a palindrome? Airbnb asks this to test two-pointer-in-place rather than the easier O(n) extra-space approach.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #127hardfrequently asked
127. Word Ladder
Given begin/end words and a word list, find the shortest transformation sequence (one letter at a time, each step in the list). Airbnb asks this to test BFS on implicit graphs plus the wildcard-bucket trick.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #159mediumfrequently asked
159. Longest Substring With At Most Two Distinct Characters
Find the length of the longest substring of s containing at most two distinct characters. Airbnb asks this as the sliding-window-with-count template they'll generalize to K in the follow-up.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #207mediumfrequently asked
207. Course Schedule
Given courses and prerequisites, determine if you can finish all courses. Airbnb asks this to test whether you map the problem to 'is the directed graph a DAG?' and reach for either Kahn's BFS or DFS 3-color.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #211mediumfrequently asked
211. Design Add and Search Words Data Structure
Design WordDictionary with addWord and a search that supports '.' as any-char. Airbnb asks this to test trie + bounded DFS — '.' branches all 26 children at that position.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #212hardfrequently asked
212. Word Search II
Given an m x n board of letters and a list of words, return all words formed by adjacent cells (no reuse). Airbnb asks this to test trie + DFS — running word-by-word DFS doesn't scale.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #269hardcompany favorite
269. Alien Dictionary
Given a list of words sorted lexicographically in some unknown alphabet, derive the order. Airbnb asks this to test inferring a directed graph from pairwise word comparisons plus topological sort.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #295hardcompany favorite
295. Find Median From Data Stream
Design a data structure that supports addNum and findMedian in roughly O(log n) and O(1). Airbnb asks this to test the two-heaps trick: a max-heap of the lower half balanced with a min-heap of the upper half.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #297hardfrequently asked
297. Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree
Encode a binary tree to a string and decode the string back. Airbnb asks this to test pre-order with explicit null markers vs level-order serialization — both work, but pick one and defend it.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #314mediumcompany favorite
314. Binary Tree Vertical Order Traversal
Return the values of a binary tree visited in vertical order, top to bottom, left to right. Airbnb asks this to test BFS with column tracking and how you order ties (left before right at the same row).
3 free resourcesSolve → - #340mediumfrequently asked
340. Longest Substring With At Most K Distinct Characters
Length of the longest substring of s with at most K distinct characters. Airbnb asks this right after LC 159 to see if you generalize the sliding-window template from 2 to K with no other code change.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #347mediumfrequently asked
347. Top K Frequent Elements
Given an integer array and integer k, return the k most frequent elements. Airbnb asks this to test whether you reach for bucket sort or a min-heap — both beat the naive sort.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #380mediumcompany favorite
380. Insert Delete GetRandom O(1)
Design a set supporting insert, remove, and getRandom all in O(1) average. Airbnb asks this to test the array + hash-map-of-indices pattern — array gives O(1) random; hash map gives O(1) lookup; swap-remove keeps both true.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #545mediumcompany favorite
545. Boundary of Binary Tree
Return the values on the boundary of a binary tree: left side top-down, leaves left-to-right, right side bottom-up. Airbnb asks this to test combining three different traversals without double-counting corners.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #755mediumcompany favorite
755. Pour Water
Simulate dropping V units of water at index K on a height array. Each unit prefers left, then right, then stays. Airbnb asks this to test careful simulation — the rules are pickier than they look.
3 free resourcesSolve → - #2137mediumless common
2137. Pour Water Between Buckets to Make Water Levels Equal
You have n buckets with water; you may pour from i to j but lose a fraction loss/100 in transit. Maximize the equal level achievable. Airbnb asks this to test binary search on a continuous answer plus a feasibility check.
3 free resourcesSolve →
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