Current Status
Position : SDE - 2 at FAANGM+
Location : Remote in India
Years of Experience : 5
Current TC : 45 LPA

Applied Position : Core Backend Engineer
Location : Amsterdam
Date : Mid March 2022

Applied online on Booking.com's careers page in early February. Recruiter reached back within a day and gave a HackerRank test to solve within a week.

Round 1 : HackerRank Test

1. It had 3 questions and the time limit was 90 minutes.
2. 1st was a simple priority queue question.
3. 2nd was Minimum Knight Moves on LC.
4. 3rd was Top K Hotels question. This is a very popular Booking.com question, you can google it.

Recruiter reached back within 3 days that they wanted to proceed for onsites. I scheduled the onsites after 10 days but they cancelled at the last minute, which I found extremely unprofessional. They rescheduled for a week later.

Round 2 : Onsite Technical - 1

1. Was a DFS based graph problem. It was extremely wrong and involved using DFS once and then using DFS again on the solution.
2. I don't remember the exact problem but it was something based on a bunch of cities are given along with flights between those cities. You have to plan a trip between the cities in such a way that you don't cross a pre determined budget, cover maximum cities that you can and the starting and ending city should be same.
3. They didn't want the complete solution. They were happy if your interaction is good and you're in the right direction.

Round 3 : Onsite Technical - 2

1. This was a System Design Round.
2. You're given an external system which can tell you whether there are available rooms at a hotel. Multiple hotel booking services like Booking, Expedia, etc are all using this service to book hotels. How would you handle the problem of making sure a hotel room is booked.
3. There was a lot of discussion about handling different type of cases, how the hotel booking services will update the external service when they've booked a room, collision cases, and how to make this design extensible.

After 2 days, recruiter reached back and said they want to schedule the culture fit round

Round 4 : Culutre Fit Round

1. This was a discussion with 2 Engineering Managers.
2. They introduced themselves and told about the team I was interviewing for. There wasn't a clear discussion about what my role would be if I were to join.
3. They asked questions about my current role and standard behavioral questions like how would I handle conflicts with my manager or with a teammate.
4. One technical question was asked about how do I approach the problem if an issue is raised during on call.

After 2 days, recruiter reached back and said they wanted to make an offer. Overall, the process was quite easy. Easier than an SDE - 2 interview at Amazon or Microsoft. I rejected the offer because I accepted the offer at Bloomberg, London.

Tips

1. Be interactive. Don't go quiet. Keep talking through your thought process.
2. Go through previous questions asked by Booking.com.
3. Focus on graph based problems.
4. For system design, g$#kking is enough to grasp the basics.

Offer Details Here : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/2134106/Booking.com-or-Core-Backend-Engineer-or-Amsterdam

Good luck to all! Happy to answer questions in comments. You can also go through my other experiences below.

1. Bloomberg Experience : https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/2133894/Bloomberg-or-Senior-Software-Engineer-or-London-or-March-2022-or-Offer