I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Apr 2022
Interview
The initial screening interview with recruiter went well, containing usual tech screening
questions about your abilities to understand simple technical terms, your experience etc.
The interviewing process promised to be short, 2 weeks or smth.
I was told that there will be 3 rounds of interviews: technical + hackerrank task, people management skills and final one for cultural fit. It was confirmed by recuiter that they don't drop candidates after first tech interview, but proceed further to review candidate's abilities in different areas.
First technical interview was with 2 Principal engineers from one of the departments.
Both interviewers seems dull and disconnected during whole 1 hour interview. We started with simple introductions of ourselves and straight into questioning, without any introduction into company technical stack etc.
Interview itself went more like interrogation in some government agency. I was left with 2 minutes for questions from my side, answers to them was very formal without any details.
Interview ended with formal - "recuiter will contact you".
After that interview I was left with feeling that I'm not welcomed at all.
I've waited 3 days for some kind of feedback or automatic rejection email - nothing, none, silence.
I've wrote an email to recuiter who screened me, expressing my indignation about the silence after the interview. In response I've received: "I'm sorry what we can do better next time." Still no indication did I passed or not the tech interview at all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Let's create infrastructure architecture for Instagram clone application, starting from single bare-metal machine running both the application and the database.
Q: You had initial 100 internal users and now you're growing, how would you scale your application?
Q: How would you scale your application to multiple region datacenters (US and EU for example)?
Applied then ghosted for 1 month. Then the recruiter contacted me and asked to book an interview (system design).
Then I got ghosted again for two weeks after the interview. I assumed I failed but after two weeks recruiter congratulated me saying I passed with flying colors and they would like to continue with me. =)
For the next 1 hour interview, I have given them 24 time slots starting from a week from then.
This was one week ago, I am currently ghosted again =)
There are five more interviews, with this speed it would roughly take 7-8 months to complete the process.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions are easy. Booking an interview is improbable.
I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam)
Interview
Solution Designing followed by Case Study and code reviews. the initial 2 rounds followed by a business fitment and finally a HR discussion where mostly salaries, relocation details, etc. were discussed
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
design a messaging system design a notification delivery system via different modes (email, fax, sms, etc.) for hotel booking
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Apr 2023
Interview
Interview process had 4 stages a) System Design Round b) Coding Round c) Stakeholder Management Round d) People Management Round I cleared the first 3 rounds and the recruiter told me that they are deciding the location of the role. After 1 week of waiting, recruiter told me that the role is on hold. I told her that I am open to other roles. She passed me to other recruiter who discussed the role with me and tole me that hiring manager is interested and he will schedule the last interview. After 2 days, I got an automated response saying the role is closed. I asked both the recruiters if there is another role but I got no response from them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Design a Fraud Data Pipeline 2. Something around given list of flights and days, find shortest route to cover all cities. 3. General stakeholder management questions
Engineering Manager applicants have rated the interview process at Booking.com with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 45% positive. To compare, the company-average is 59% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Engineering Manager roles take an average of 44 days to get hired, when considering 11 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 Engineering Manager according to 11 Glassdoor interviews include:
Group panel interview: 26%
Skills test: 23%
One on one interview: 19%
Phone interview: 19%
Presentation: 10%
Background check: 3%
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