The Interview

What Airbnb is looking for

Pipeline Design Interview

Data Pipeline Architecture

01Airflow DAG Design Patterns

02Data Quality & SLA Management

03Schema Evolution Strategy

04Batch vs. Streaming Trade-offs

Data Modeling Interview

Data Modeling & Warehousing

01Dimensional Modeling

02Event-Driven Architecture

03Data Lake Design

04Metric Layer Architecture

Behavioral Interview

01Data Quality Ownership

02Cross-Functional Collaboration

03Scaling Under Ambiguity

04Open-Source Contribution Mindset

Airflow-native pipeline thinking//Marketplace data modeling depth//Open-source data infrastructure culture

How It Works

Master Airbnb Data Engineering Interviews

Pipeline architecture and data modeling rounds, scored on Airbnb’s data engineering evaluation dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your Data Engineering Goals

Pipeline Design

Practitioner

Data Quality

Practitioner

2Data Engineering Case Prep

Airbnb search ranking data pipeline has a 6-hour freshness gap causing stale pricing in...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Airbnb

3Frameworks

Framework

Are ingestion-layer failures causing the delay?

Is source API throttling or connector backpressure blocking ingestion?

Fivetran connector retry backlog: 4.2M rows pending (target: <200K)

Source API rate limit hit 3× in 24 hrs: 429 errors spiked to 18%

Has data volume growth outpaced ingestion capacity?

Event volume grew 3.8× in 90 days (new product launch)

Kafka consumer lag on orders topic: 4.7M events (normal: <50K)

Are transformation bottlenecks the primary cause?

Is Spark job skew causing excessive stage runtimes?

P99 Spark stage time: 4.2 hrs (SLA: 30 min) — 1 key holds 62% of data

Task straggler rate: 34% of tasks >5× median runtime

Are dbt model dependencies creating serial transformation chains?

7 of 12 critical models run sequentially (parallelizable)

Full refresh on 3 models re-scans 1.4TB daily — no incremental strategy

Are orchestration failures causing downstream lag?

Is Airflow task queue backlogged from cascading retries?

Active DAG queue: 847 tasks (baseline: 60) — 14× normal

3 upstream DAGs set to retry 5× each with no SLA-aware delay

Is SLA miss detection too slow to trigger escalation?

SLA alert fired 4.5 hrs after breach (monitoring interval: 1 hr)

No freshness checks on 8 of 12 critical tables (Great Expectations gaps)

4Feedback

Pipeline Architecture

Distinctive

Data Reliability

Strong

Freshness & SLA Reasoning

Meeting Bar

Schema Management

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Airbnb exercises

Design an Airflow-based pipeline that ingests real-time booking events, transforms them...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Travel Tech · Pipeline DesignAirbnb

Airbnb’s pricing data warehouse grew to 50TB and downstream queries are timing out....

LEARNHard

Travel Tech · Data ModelingAirbnb

A critical Airflow DAG that powers host payouts failed silently for 3 days. Design a...

LEARNMedium

Travel Tech · Data QualityAirbnb

Prepare for your Airbnb data engineering interview

What Airbnb is looking for

Data Pipeline Architecture

Data Modeling & Warehousing

Behavioral Interview

Airbnb exercises

Ready to ace your Airbnb data engineering interview?

Prepare for your Airbnb data engineering interview

What Airbnb is looking for

Data Pipeline Architecture

Data Modeling & Warehousing

Behavioral Interview

Master Airbnb Data Engineering Interviews

Airbnb search ranking data pipeline has a 6-hour freshness gap causing stale pricing in...

Master Airbnb Data Engineering Interviews

Airbnb search ranking data pipeline has a 6-hour freshness gap causing stale pricing in...

Airbnb exercises

Design an Airflow-based pipeline that ingests real-time booking events, transforms them...

Airbnb’s pricing data warehouse grew to 50TB and downstream queries are timing out....

A critical Airflow DAG that powers host payouts failed silently for 3 days. Design a...

Ready to ace your Airbnb data engineering interview?

Master Airbnb Data Engineering Interviews

Airbnb search ranking data pipeline has a 6-hour freshness gap causing stale pricing in...

Master Airbnb Data Engineering Interviews

Airbnb search ranking data pipeline has a 6-hour freshness gap causing stale pricing in...

Design an Airflow-based pipeline that ingests real-time booking events, transforms them...

Airbnb’s pricing data warehouse grew to 50TB and downstream queries are timing out....

A critical Airflow DAG that powers host payouts failed silently for 3 days. Design a...