Finished the Airbnb onsite in March 2026 for an L4 iOS role. There's enough info floating around about individual rounds but not much on how the full day actually flows, so here goes.
The structure: Airbnb's onsite is 5 rounds back to back (they're all virtual now, at least for the roles I was interviewing for). Mine was: Coding round 1 System design Behavioral / values Coding round 2 "Cross-functional" round (this was with a PM and TPM, not an engineer)
The cross-functional round surprised me. They asked how I'd work with a PM to scope a feature, gave a small scenario about trade-offs on a product direction, and asked me to walk through how I'd communicate a technical constraint to a non-technical stakeholder. It's not graded like the coding rounds but it's not soft either.
Timing and scheduling: My rounds were scheduled from 9am to 2pm PT with 10-minute breaks between. The breaks were actually breaks, nobody was pinging me. By round 4 (second coding) I was pretty tired, which you should account for.
Turnaround: I got a call from my recruiter with verbal feedback 4 business days after the onsite. Offer letter came 2 days after that. This was fast compared to other companies I was running concurrently. By comparison I was still waiting on Meta's debrief 3 weeks later.
On the cross-functional round: I wasn't prepped for it. I'd only prepared technical and behavioral. If I did it again I'd have thought through a few scenarios about technical-product tension and how I've navigated it, because that's exactly what they were probing.
Misc: They asked for references after the verbal offer, before the written letter. One recruiter told me references almost never tank an offer at this stage, but have them lined up and give them a heads up.