I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Manchester, England) in Mar 2017
Interview
First informal interview, then a technical test, a micro project in Java using Spring and creating a REST API, then a competency interview and finally the technical interview. Interviews were all via skype.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I did only the competence interview, about my past projects and current. They asked me a lot of informations about technologies used and so on. They said me that I couldn't proceed to the technical test because I answered to a question in a contradictory manner. I mean they ask me If I used automatic test environment I said No, specifing that in my last project, my application was under an aoutomatic test but configured by the test team, I received the feed back to fix bug or improve some parameters but I never used directly an automatic test environment. It is no a contraddiction in my opinion.
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.
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
Application
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.