I applied through university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam)
Interview
The process consisted of 2 parts.
I submitted my CV at a Job Fair organized at the University, I was emailed the night to have an in person interview the day after, which lasted less than 1 hour (with 2 interviewers).
After that, they let me know in a couple of days that they would have liked to meet in person for the second part of the interview. In about a week we organized the trip to Amsterdam.
The second part consisted of 3 interviews plus some HR questions (like "why booking?").
The first one was a 1 hour technical interview pretty similar to the first one. The people did not put much pressure during my time solving the problems, but they did question my decisions and asked what other choices there would have been and why I didn't pick them.
The second one was again 1 hour interview, this time more focused on the design of components and the architecture choices to make. Both these interviews were with 2 interviewers, who were developers. They wanted me to extremely precise in the system I was describing ( I explained the same design in 3 different ways). I don't think I performed too well in this part.
The last one, 1 hour too, was about business understanding. This time it was 1 on 1 and the interviewer was the lead of team leads. It was a really relaxed and interesting interview, where he asked me if I knew the business model of Booking.com, what I would have changed in the site (asking to elaborate quite a bit on my replies), how I would decide if a feature under testing should be made permanent or not.
At the end of the interviews they showed me the building.
In a couple of days HR called me to tell me they liked me and she sent me an offer
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Call a function F in a loop. F returns a string of 140 chars. Write to the output 1 when F returns a string with the same letters (basically a permutation) of a string previously returned. (the question was not this well formed)
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
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