What is a DevOps Engineer at Airbnb?

As a DevOps Engineer (often operating interchangeably with Site Reliability Engineering or SRE teams) at Airbnb, you are the backbone of a platform that powers millions of global stays and experiences. Your work directly enables thousands of software engineers to build, deploy, and scale microservices seamlessly. You are not just maintaining servers; you are engineering reliable, automated "paved roads" that allow product teams to move fast without breaking things.

The impact of this position is immense. Airbnb operates at a massive, global scale with highly seasonal traffic spikes, complex distributed systems, and a microservices architecture running primarily on AWS and Kubernetes. When you optimize infrastructure or improve deployment pipelines, you directly enhance the experience of guests booking their dream vacations and hosts managing their livelihoods.

You can expect a role that balances deep technical complexity with strategic influence. You will tackle challenges related to multi-region cloud architecture, strict latency requirements, and sophisticated incident response. This role requires a software engineering mindset applied to infrastructure problems, meaning you will write code, automate relentlessly, and champion a culture of high availability across the entire engineering organization.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions are representative of what you will face, drawn from recent candidate experiences. While you should not memorize answers, use these to understand the patterns and depth of knowledge expected by Airbnb interviewers.

Coding and Scripting

These questions test your ability to write functional, efficient code to solve infrastructure and automation problems.

• Write a Python script to parse a large JSON file of server metrics and calculate the 95th percentile of CPU usage.
• Implement a rate limiter function that could be used as middleware for an API.
• Write a bash script to find all files larger than 1GB modified in the last 7 days and archive them.
• Given a list of server dependencies, write a function to determine the correct startup order.
• Write a program to monitor a log file in real-time and trigger an alert if a specific error pattern occurs more than 5 times in a minute.

Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture

These questions evaluate your knowledge of cloud services, infrastructure design, and provisioning tools.

• How would you design the infrastructure for a photo-upload service that needs to serve millions of users globally with low latency?
• Walk me through how you would set up a multi-environment (Dev, Staging, Prod) Terraform workflow.
• What are the differences between an Application Load Balancer and a Network Load Balancer in AWS, and when would you use each?
• Explain the architecture of a Kubernetes cluster. What happens if the API server goes down?
• How do you manage secrets and sensitive configuration data in a distributed microservices environment?

Systems Internals and Troubleshooting

These questions test your fundamental knowledge of how operating systems and networks function, and how you diagnose failures.

• A service running on port 8080 is unreachable from another machine. Walk me through your troubleshooting steps.
• Explain the Linux boot process from the moment you press the power button to the login prompt.
• What is DNS, how does it work, and how would you troubleshoot a DNS resolution failure?
• Explain the concept of inodes in Linux. What happens if a filesystem runs out of inodes but still has disk space?
• Describe the TCP three-way handshake and the four-way teardown.

Behavioral and Core Values

These questions assess your alignment with Airbnb's culture, your teamwork, and your approach to challenges.

• Tell me about a time you had to resolve a conflict with a software engineering team over a deployment process.
• Describe a situation where you made a significant mistake that caused an outage. How did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time you identified a manual, repetitive task and took the initiative to automate it.
• How do you balance the need for shipping features quickly with the need to maintain system reliability?
• Describe a time you had to mentor a junior engineer or help a teammate overcome a technical hurdle.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the DevOps Engineer interview at Airbnb requires a strategic approach. Your interviewers are looking for a blend of deep infrastructure knowledge, strong coding capabilities, and an alignment with the company's collaborative culture.

Focus your preparation on these key evaluation criteria:

• Infrastructure and Systems Engineering – This evaluates your mastery of cloud platforms (specifically AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform). Interviewers want to see that you can design secure, scalable, and resilient systems.
• Coding and Automation – Unlike traditional operations roles, DevOps Engineers at Airbnb must be proficient coders. You will be evaluated on your ability to write clean, efficient code (typically in Python or Go) to solve infrastructure problems, parse logs, or build internal tooling.
• Troubleshooting and Incident Response – This measures your problem-solving ability under pressure. Interviewers will assess how you navigate complex Linux systems, debug networking issues, and systematically isolate the root cause of an outage.
• Core Values and Culture Fit – Airbnb places a massive emphasis on its culture. You will be evaluated on your ability to "Be a Host," demonstrate empathy, communicate clearly, and collaborate effectively with cross-functional engineering teams.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a DevOps Engineer at Airbnb is rigorous, structured, and designed to test both your technical depth and your cultural alignment. You will typically start with a recruiter phone screen to discuss your background, compensation expectations, and general fit. This is followed by a technical phone screen, which is often a coding round or a mix of systems troubleshooting and scripting.

If you pass the initial screens, you will move to the virtual onsite loop. The onsite typically consists of four to five distinct rounds. You will face dedicated sessions for software engineering (coding algorithms or practical automation), systems design and architecture, infrastructure deep dives, and at least one dedicated behavioral round focused on Airbnb's core values.

Airbnb takes a highly collaborative approach to interviewing. Your interviewers will act as your peers, expecting you to drive the conversation while remaining receptive to hints and feedback. The process is designed to simulate real-world problem-solving, so expect open-ended questions where clarifying requirements is just as important as finding the solution.

This visual timeline outlines the typical stages of the Airbnb interview journey, from the initial recruiter screen to the final offer decision. Use this to structure your preparation timeline, ensuring you peak in your coding and system design practice right before the intensive onsite loop. Keep in mind that specific rounds may vary slightly depending on the exact team or seniority level you are targeting.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Coding and Automation

As a DevOps Engineer at Airbnb, you are expected to treat infrastructure as a software problem. The coding rounds are not just about writing bash scripts; you will face standard algorithmic questions and practical automation tasks. Interviewers want to see that you can write modular, maintainable code, handle edge cases, and utilize appropriate data structures.

Be ready to go over:

• Scripting and Log Parsing – Reading large log files, extracting specific data points, and aggregating metrics using Python or Go.
• Data Structures and Algorithms – Hash maps, arrays, string manipulation, and basic graph traversal, often framed within an infrastructure context (e.g., parsing a dependency tree).
• API Integration – Writing scripts to interact with REST APIs, handling pagination, and managing rate limits.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Concurrent programming, building simple web servers from scratch, or writing custom Kubernetes operators.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a script to parse an Nginx access log and return the top 10 IP addresses with the highest number of 5xx errors."
• "Implement a function that checks for circular dependencies in a list of microservices."
• "Write a program to periodically query a health endpoint and alert if the service fails three times consecutively."

Infrastructure and Cloud Architecture

This area evaluates your ability to design, deploy, and manage large-scale distributed systems. Airbnb relies heavily on AWS, and your interviewers will expect you to understand the nuances of cloud networking, compute, and storage. You must demonstrate how to build systems that are highly available, secure, and cost-effective.

Be ready to go over:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – Deep knowledge of Terraform, managing state files, and writing reusable modules.
• Containerization and Orchestration – Docker internals, Kubernetes architecture, writing deployment manifests, and understanding pods, nodes, and control planes.
• Cloud Networking – VPCs, subnets, routing tables, load balancers (ALB/NLB), and handling cross-region traffic.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Service meshes (like Istio), eBPF for observability, and advanced AWS IAM policy debugging.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Design a highly available multi-region architecture for a new internal service on AWS."
• "How would you structure a Terraform repository for a company with hundreds of microservices and multiple environments?"
• "Explain how a Kubernetes pod gets an IP address and how it communicates with a pod on a different node."

Linux Systems and Troubleshooting

When things break at Airbnb, the DevOps Engineer is often the first line of defense. This evaluation area tests your deep understanding of Linux internals, networking protocols, and systematic debugging. Interviewers want to see a logical, step-by-step approach to isolating faults.

Be ready to go over:

• Linux Internals – CPU scheduling, memory management (OOM killer), file systems, and inodes.
• Networking Protocols – TCP/IP handshake, DNS resolution, HTTP/HTTPS, and TLS termination.
• Observability and Monitoring – Using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to define SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Kernel tuning, debugging system calls with strace, and analyzing TCP dumps.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "A developer reports that their application cannot connect to the database. Walk me through your troubleshooting steps."
• "What happens exactly when you type curl https://www.airbnb.com and press enter?"
• "How would you investigate a server that is experiencing high load but low CPU utilization?"

Core Values and Behavioral Fit

Airbnb is famous for its culture, and the behavioral interviews are heavily weighted. Interviewers will assess your past experiences to see if you embody traits like "Be a Host" and "Embrace the Adventure." They want to ensure you are collaborative, empathetic, and capable of navigating ambiguity without ego.

Be ready to go over:

• Cross-functional Collaboration – How you work with software engineers to improve their workflows and adopt new tooling.
• Handling Failure – Discussing past outages you caused or mitigated, focusing on the post-mortem process and what you learned.
• Mentorship and Leadership – How you upskill your teammates and advocate for reliability best practices.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Influencing product roadmaps to prioritize technical debt and infrastructure scaling.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Tell me about a time you had to push back on a development team that wanted to deploy an unstable feature."
• "Describe a situation where you had to learn a completely new technology under a tight deadline."
• "Tell me about a time you went above and beyond to help a colleague succeed."

Key Responsibilities

As a DevOps Engineer at Airbnb, your day-to-day work revolves around building and maintaining the infrastructure platform that empowers the rest of the engineering organization. You will spend a significant portion of your time writing Terraform to provision AWS resources and configuring Kubernetes clusters to handle high-traffic workloads. You are responsible for ensuring that the underlying infrastructure is scalable, secure, and highly available.

Collaboration is a massive part of this role. You will partner closely with product engineering teams to understand their infrastructure needs, help them design scalable microservices, and guide them on best practices for observability and deployment. You will build CI/CD pipelines that automate testing and deployment, reducing manual toil and accelerating the speed at which Airbnb can ship new features to users.

Incident management and operational readiness are also core responsibilities. You will participate in an on-call rotation, responding to critical alerts and leading incident triage. Beyond immediate firefighting, you will drive the post-mortem process, identify root causes, and engineer automated solutions to ensure the same issue never happens twice. You will continuously monitor system performance, optimize cloud costs, and define the SLIs and SLOs that keep Airbnb reliable.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a competitive candidate for the DevOps Engineer position at Airbnb, you must possess a strong blend of software engineering fundamentals and deep systems knowledge. The ideal candidate has a proven track record of managing infrastructure at scale and is comfortable writing code to solve operational challenges.

• Must-have skills – Deep expertise in Linux administration and troubleshooting. Proficiency in a high-level programming language like Python or Go. Extensive hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC) and container orchestration using Kubernetes. Mastery of infrastructure as code, specifically Terraform.
• Experience level – Typically requires 4+ years of experience in a DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering role, preferably within a high-growth or large-scale consumer tech environment.
• Soft skills – Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts to non-infrastructure engineers. A collaborative mindset, high empathy, and a strong sense of ownership over system reliability.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience with service meshes (Istio, Envoy), advanced CI/CD pipeline design (Spinnaker, Buildkite), and a deep understanding of database performance tuning (MySQL, Redis, Cassandra).

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the coding round for DevOps Engineers at Airbnb? The coding bar is high. Unlike some companies that accept basic bash scripting, Airbnb expects you to write clean, algorithmic code in a language like Python or Go. You should be comfortable with data structures, string manipulation, and API interactions.

Q: How much preparation time is typical for this interview loop? Most successful candidates spend 4 to 6 weeks preparing. You should divide your time equally between practicing coding problems, reviewing systems design concepts, and preparing structured behavioral stories using the STAR method.

Q: What differentiates a successful candidate from an average one? Successful candidates demonstrate a strong "engineering mindset" applied to operations. They don't just know how to use tools; they understand how those tools work under the hood. They also excel in the behavioral rounds by showing genuine empathy and a collaborative spirit.

Q: Is the DevOps Engineer role fully remote? Airbnb has a highly flexible "Live and Work Anywhere" design, meaning many DevOps and SRE roles can be fully remote within your country of employment. However, you should confirm specific location requirements with your recruiter during the initial screen.

Q: What is the typical timeline from the initial screen to an offer? The process usually takes between 3 to 5 weeks. After the onsite loop, the hiring committee typically reviews your packet and makes a decision within a week.

Other General Tips

• Think out loud during technical rounds: Interviewers at Airbnb value communication as much as the final answer. Explain your thought process, discuss trade-offs, and talk through your approach before writing code or drawing an architecture diagram.
• Clarify before answering: System design and troubleshooting questions are deliberately ambiguous. Always ask clarifying questions to define the scope, scale, and constraints before proposing a solution.

• Master the STAR method for behavioral questions: Structure your stories clearly: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Focus heavily on the "Action" (what you specifically did) and the "Result" (quantifiable impact and lessons learned).
• Study Airbnb's Core Values: Read up on Airbnb's mission and values before the interview. Incorporate themes of hosting, belonging, and embracing adventure naturally into your behavioral responses.
• Admit what you don't know: If you are asked a deep Linux kernel question and don't know the answer, do not guess blindly. Acknowledge your knowledge gap, but immediately follow up with how you would go about finding the answer or debugging the issue.

Summary & Next Steps

Joining Airbnb as a DevOps Engineer is an opportunity to work at the cutting edge of cloud infrastructure and distributed systems. You will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability and scalability of a platform that connects millions of people around the world. The work is challenging, highly visible, and deeply rewarding, offering you the chance to collaborate with some of the best engineering minds in the industry.

To succeed in this interview, focus on demonstrating a balanced skill set. Brush up on your Python or Go programming, review your Kubernetes and Terraform fundamentals, and practice articulating your troubleshooting methodology. Remember that Airbnb places a premium on culture, so bring your authentic self, show empathy, and highlight your ability to collaborate across teams.

This compensation module provides a baseline understanding of the salary range for infrastructure and DevOps roles at Airbnb. Keep in mind that total compensation is heavily influenced by your specific seniority level, location, and the equity component (RSUs), which forms a significant part of the overall package. Use this data to set realistic expectations and inform your negotiations once you reach the offer stage.

Approach your preparation with confidence and curiosity. The interview process is designed to be a collaborative dialogue, not an interrogation. By dedicating focused time to practice your technical skills and refine your behavioral stories, you will be well-positioned to ace the loop. You have the experience and the potential—now it is time to showcase it. Best of luck on your journey to joining Airbnb!