Just finished the Airbnb coding rounds (did the full loop in May 2026, targeting L4 frontend-adjacent SWE). Wanted to write up the coding side since there's not much recent info.
Format: There's an online assessment before the phone screen. Two problems, 90 minutes, CoderPad-style environment. No system design, no behavioral, just coding. Language of your choice.
The OA problems I got were: A graph traversal problem. Not just BFS/DFS, but layered: find the shortest path, then handle a constraint that changes the graph dynamically. Probably LeetCode medium-hard. A string manipulation + frequency counting problem. Medium difficulty. Clean implementation mattered.
After passing the OA, the phone screen has one coding problem. Mine was a sliding window problem with a twist on the constraint. Again LeetCode medium in difficulty, but with a follow-up that pushed it toward hard.
In the onsite there are two dedicated coding rounds: One felt like a pure algo problem (trees, I got a tree serialization variant) One was more applied, like "given this data, write a function to compute X" with an emphasis on edge cases and clean code
Tips from doing it: They actually care about code quality. Not just "does it work" but is it readable, are variable names sensible, do you handle edge cases without being prompted. Talking through your thinking matters. I solved the first coding problem silently and got feedback in my debrief that they wanted more narration. Second one I talked the whole way through and felt much better. The difficulty ceiling is LeetCode hard territory but the median problem in my loop was medium. Don't only grind hards.
Failed the OA at Airbnb 6 months ago, retried, passed this time. The difference was practicing to talk and code at the same time, not just grinding more problems.