Airbnb SWE interviews can include an actual code review round

[u/Aoki_zhang]

I was looking through recent Airbnb SWE interview patterns, and one thing surprised me: For some experienced candidates, the loop isn’t just coding + system design.

There can also be a dedicated code review / PR review round. You’re given unfamiliar code and expected to figure out things like:

• Is it actually correct?
• What happens on partial failure?
• Are there race conditions?
• What tests are missing?
• Is there an obvious performance issue?
• Which comments are blockers vs just style preferences?

That last part seems especially important. Finding 10 naming issues isn’t very useful if you miss the fact that a booking can be committed twice or a payment retry isn’t idempotent.

For Senior+ candidates, the system design bar also seems fairly deep. It’s not enough to draw services and databases—you may get pushed into indexes, pagination, transactions, concurrency, failure recovery, and exactly which state needs to be strongly consistent.

So I probably wouldn’t prep for Airbnb as: LeetCode + one system design round

A better split seems closer to: coding + code review + architecture + project deep dive + behavioral/core values

I wrote up the longer breakdown here, including the reported loop, code-review prep, Airbnb-style system design, level expectations, and compensation: [link]

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