I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Jul 2021
Interview
I was approached on LinkedIn/E-mail by a recruiter, scheduled a phone call, discussed the position and my profile shortly, the recruiter then helped to get an interview scheduled with the hiring team from Booking.com
The interview itself started well, I was in a call with 2 other engineers, where I was supposed to solve a coding challenge while sharing the screen.
Unfortunately, the big down side for me is that I was told I was not allowed to search on the internet (e.g Google) or look up any documentation while working on the exercise. However, I was told I could ask questions at anytime.
The engineers were not really "happy" to answer my questions during the call, though.
I had to follow-up with the recruiter to ask for more feedback after receiving their email rejecting me... and I was told that I had asked too many questions to the engineers during the interview.
All in all, I had a very good impression of their hiring process in the beginning, but I was disappointed on how the interview was conducted.
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