I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Booking.com
Interview
A recruiter got in touch, offered a position in Amsterdam, NL, arranged a call with another technology recruiter for basic screening.
The interviewer was nice & helpful, asked a few questions about my experience & motivation; told about the company, next steps in their recruiting process & answered my questions - the usual stuff.
Next - have been invited to attend the challenge on HackerRank.com. There were a few tasks: one - directly related to a position I'm applying for (Android) and a few more general programming/algorithm problems, quite easy. Could choose to perform these in any programming language of my choice.
Next - after about a week - got feedback on the challenge & arranged a remote interview with 2 developers where I would have to perform a live coding assignment in hackerrank.com/work/codepair
Was advised to revise my knowledge on algorithms, data structures & Android platform in general.
The interviewers were quite supportive, gave two tasks: write algorithm to compute the intersection of two arrays; then - handling async tasks in Android & a series of questions on Android.
Failed the first assignment, did decent in the 2nd one. After about a week - got feedback that they decided not to go forward with my application.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
HackerRank.com - Android: Implement findViewById method given that View extends ViewGroup (use recursion)
Android: Given a few pre-defined methods, how to download, decode & set the decoded bitmap to an ImageView. What would happen on configuration change (eg. screen rotation), how to avoid those problems
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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