I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Apr 2022
Interview
I attended three steps of interviews. These are Online Coding, System Design and Cultural Fit. All of them were comprehensive and challenging.
At the initial, I was called online by recruiter.This was about introduction,job,education and work experiences.
At first 15-20 minutes of coding interview, interviewers asked some questions about data structures. Afer this part, I was asked a coding problem. It was a hard level question. I think candidate should have 10 minutes to think and design solution in mind. By talking and answering questions, coding is too hard.
System design interview was pretty good. Duration is 90 minutes. Candidates should tell about functional and non-functional requirements, estimations, tradeoffs, bottlenecks, database design, API design, database selection and draw design.
Cultural fit is a tiring interview as well. Duration is 60 min. I was asked 12 questions in one hour. First part consists of questions about behavorial and career.
Second part is about Booking such as how booking makes money and what Booking's business model.(agency vs merchant)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
My coding question was to write a function takes an integer and convert it into english words.
Exp:
Input: 1234
Output: One thousand two hundred thirty four.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Booking.com
Interview
I recently interviewed with Booking.com for a software engineer role. The process was well-organized and took about 3–4 weeks. It started with an online assessment on HackerRank with a couple of LeetCode medium problems. That was followed by a technical screen where I did live coding and discussed basic algorithms. The final round was a full day of back-to-back sessions: algorithmic coding, system design (something like designing a hotel availability checker), a behavioral round using STAR questions, and a chat with a manager about company values. The interviewers were professional and friendly, and the problems felt relevant to Booking's actual business. On the downside, some coding rounds felt repetitive, and I didn't get much feedback after being rejected. Overall, it was a fair but challenging process. My advice: practice medium-level array and hash map problems, review basic system design, and have solid STAR stories ready. I'd rate it 4 out of 5 stars and would recommend it to other engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a hotel search and availability system that returns available rooms for a given date range and can handle high traffic.
I applied online. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam)
Interview
The whole process is composed of about 5 stages. Initial interview, then technical interview, followed by a “ownership” interview, then by a team-fit check interview. The initial interview is done by recruiters not based in the Netherlands (at least my experience) and felt as if the role had already been filled by the time I took it. Was answered with a “I’m doing good, hope you are doing good too. So this interview…” to “Hi, nice to meet you! How are you?”. It simply felt as if they didn’t want to be there and there was 0 engagement.
Screener with a Director, coding round with TDD where you pair with an engineer and have an engineering manager present, behavioural with a senior engineering manager and an apprentice who was sitting it