I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Oct 2015
Interview
Interview contained 7 rounds:
- Hackerrank test. Contained 4 questions
- HR prescreening
- Online interview with shared notepad
- HR interview onsite, telling about company processes and culture.
- 2 rounds of onsite technical interviews. Usually they are three but the recruiter said there is no interviewer available so they will conduct the third round on skype.
- I waited for two weeks and then there was finally an online behavioural interview with a team lead.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given a string of parentheses, check if the parentheses are balanced. Then the question was extended to all types of brackets.
Output the words found in a stream of characters.
- Input: Dictionary<string>, Stream
- Output: Dictionary containing words and their occurences.
- Complexity, best case, worst case
apply online and then got an interview opportunity with the hackerrank test, after thet an hr call and then two rounds of tech interviews, after that there is a beharviour interview
I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam) in Jun 2026
Interview
Two stages:
- Technical: consisted of two parts. The first one was a hands-on coding exercise where I had to solve a problem, and the second one was focused on system design.
- Culture fit
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked about idempotency, retry mechanisms, inter-process communication, observability, reliability, and scalability.
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.