I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com in Aug 2023
Interview
There were a total of 6 rounds, I got through to the 5th. 2 rounds were recruiter screening, followed by 1 technical coding round with a Leetcode Medium question described below, then 1 System Scalability (not design) question that was quite hard and specific to database scalability.
The interviewers did not seem like they wanted to be there. I always ask at the end of each interview "What is your favourite thing about working at Booking.com" and none of them could give me an answer. One of the interviewers even laughed as if I had made a joke, then paused and clearly realised he couldn't start bad mouthing the company to a potential employee and then effectively dodged the question.
I think its a pretty big red flag when none of the interviewers can tell you why they like working there, and try to dodge the question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Cheapest Flights Sliding Door question from LeetCode. Scale a system and find the bottle necks in the current system design. There was a lot information given in the system scalability interview as its based on an existing system they give you as a POC that you must then make production ready.
I applied online. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam)
Interview
This was the first interview. In general it was a relaxed conversation with in depth moments. The main goals was to share information about the applicant, the company and see if there is a possible match. I like the academic nuance but the feedback is taking too long and is not clearly communicated.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the complexity of the pseudocode the that I am going to post in the chatbox?
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com in Dec 2023
Interview
- Recruiter’s Call: Motivation, recent experiences. etc.
- Live Coding (1 Hour): Code on Hackerrank. No need to run and test the code.
- System Design and monitoring (75 minutes)
- Cultural Fit (1 Hour): This round was super weird.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Live Coding: Easy problem related to recursion. Calculate time and space complexity.
- System Design: Design a part of Booking’s internal system.
- Cultural Fit: I had a bad experience in this round. One of the interviewers often frowned and was very dismissive. Asked odd questions:
- What is the size of your company
- How many people work in your company
- Explain to me the hierarchy of the company
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Dec 2023
Interview
It took 2-3 weeks between the initial call and the live-coding interview.
On the Live Coding, there were 2 engineers on the call. They were nice and appreciated my effort, even if the solution was no the best one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You're given an array of city pairs and a start city. You need to find a valid itinerary:
cities = [
['Milan', 'Mexico'],
['Mexico', 'Dubai'],
['Berlin', 'Milan'],
['Barcelona', 'Berlin'],
]
Having the start: "Barcelona"
Here it would be: [ Barcelona, Berlin, Milan, Mexico, Dubai ]