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.
Showing 11 problems of 32
- #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.
- #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 → - #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 → - #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 →
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