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Group Anagrams at Airbnb — Interview Guide

How to approach Group Anagrams in a Airbnb interview: the optimal approach, what Airbnb interviewers look for, and company-specific tips.

Updated 2026-09MediumArrays & Hashing

The problem at Airbnb

Given an array of strings, group the anagrams together. An anagram group contains strings that are rearrangements of the same letters.

Airbnb uses this problem to assess product craft and full-stack ownership. Expect Airbnb-specific follow-ups that tie the solution back to production reasoning and the company's engineering bar.

Key concepts

Sorting each string gives a canonical key — O(k log k) per string.
A 26-character count tuple is a key in O(k) per string and is faster for long strings.
Both produce the same groups; the count key wins when strings are long.

Approach

import collections
def group_anagrams(strs):
    groups = collections.defaultdict(list)
    for s in strs:
        key = [0] * 26
        for c in s:
            key[ord(c) - 97] += 1
        groups[tuple(key)].append(s)
    return list(groups.values())

What Airbnb looks for

Product and design sense — you care about the user experience.
Full-stack comfort (frontend + backend) for many roles.
Craft and code quality.
Alignment with 'belonging' and host/ guest empathy.

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