The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Rome)
Interview
The process interview consists of different steps.
At first you have 2 remote calls: 1 non-technical and 1 technical.
- You have to explain why you think you can be a good fit for the position and discuss about your experiences as SRE
- You will be asked to resolve two classical algorithm and data structure problems (examples from leetcode - medium level)
If you ace them you will be invited on site to run the last interviews: 2 technical e 1 behavioral.
- Algorithm and data structure problem like the previous one
- System Design interview and Linux troubleshooting questions
- Booking.com awereness and behavioral questions
Prepare yourself a lot on algorithms and data structures. The behavioral questions are important as the technical ones (do not underestimate them)
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 ]
Site Reliability Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Booking.com with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 75% positive. To compare, the company-average is 59% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Site Reliability Engineer roles take an average of 26 days to get hired, when considering 8 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Booking.com overall takes an average of 25 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Booking.com as a Site Reliability Engineer according to 8 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 50%
Skills test: 17%
Group panel interview: 17%
Background check: 8%
One on one interview: 8%
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