•SYSTEM DESIGN
Airbnb System Design Questions
Every system design problem candidates reported at Airbnb between September 2025 and September 2026, most-asked first. Each one links to a full solution.
Problems
7
Candidate reports
11
Asked more than once
3
start here
Question type
7 HLD
Design a group chat system
Design a real-time chat system like WhatsApp or Slack supporting one-to-one and group conversations (and, for Slack variants, workspaces, channels and threaded replies). Users send and receive messages with low latency, see…
Also worded as: Design a real-time chat system with hot groups
Design a Reliable Scheduler for Payment Jobs
Design a distributed job scheduler that runs user-defined jobs at a specified time (one-time) or on a recurring cron schedule, at a scale of millions of jobs per day. Requirements: jobs fire close to their scheduled time, each…
Also worded as: Design a Scalable Job Scheduler
Design a Rental Marketplace Backend
Design a hotel or rental booking system like Booking.com or Airbnb. Users search listings by location and date range with filters, view availability and a price quote, book a room or property, and cancel; hosts manage listings,…
Also worded as: Design a booking system
Design an A/B Testing Platform
Design an A/B testing (experimentation) platform. Product teams define experiments with variants, targeting and traffic allocation; users are consistently assigned to control or treatment (deterministic hashing); clients fetch…
Design a Distributed Key-Value Store
Design a horizontally scalable distributed key-value store like DynamoDB or Cassandra, or scale a single-node store to a stated workload (e.g., 50M keys, 1M requests/sec, 50/50 reads and writes). Support get/put/delete with…
Design a fast host listing metrics page
Design the backend for an Airbnb host's listings page: the host sees many listings, selects a date range, and for each listing sees aggregated metrics (views, bookings, revenue, occupancy) for that range, and the page must load…
Design a user activity query system
Design a system that collects user activity events and answers queries over recent periods, such as the number of actions a user performed in the last minute, hour or day, or activity within a time range and geographic area.…
Duplicate reports of the same problem are merged and counted.
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What system design questions does Airbnb ask?
Candidates reported 7 distinct system design problems at Airbnb between September 2025 and September 2026, including Design a group chat system, Design a Reliable Scheduler for Payment Jobs, Design a Rental Marketplace Backend.
How to prepare for Airbnb system design interview?
Start with the Airbnb problems reported most often, work through each full solution, then practice explaining a design end to end under time pressure in a mock interview.
What is the difference between HLD and LLD at Airbnb?
HLD (High-Level Design) focuses on system architecture, scalability, and component interactions. LLD (Low-Level Design) dives into class diagrams, API contracts, and database schemas. Airbnb tests both.