I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Jan 2026
Interview
I was reached out by a recruiter, had 2 rounds of intro meetings then 3 interviews: System Design, Coding, Culture. The interviewers were really nice. I've studied a lot in short amount of time to fill my gaps and tried my best. After a week from the final interview I've sent an email to the talent coordinator to see if there were any updates; it has been one month and a week since I had the final interview and I have heard completely nothing from them not even a general rejection message. In my whole career I've never went through this long of a process and got ghosted like this before.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Three interviews :System Design, Coding, Culture.
- An extension to their current service.
- Cache.
-General questions about behaviour and personality.
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