Booking Holdings

Role: SDE-2

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: September 2023

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Selected

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 4 rounds (HackerRank + 3 Onsite)

Experience:

The candidate applied via LinkedIn and was shortlisted for the SDE-2 role in Bangalore. The process started with a HackerRank test, followed by three in-person onsite interviews scheduled on the same day.

Round 1: HackerRank Test
This was a Spring Boot project involving an H2 database. The task was to clone the repository and implement three simple APIs in a hotel management service, such as adding a hotel and getting the nearest 10 hotels based on distance. The candidate was allowed to use external libraries for distance calculation. This round was considered quite simple.

Round 2: Technical Interview (DSA)
The problem involved a list of transactions, currency conversion rates, an exchange fee, and an exchange fee currency. For each payout, the candidate had to check if there was enough amount of the requested currency. If not, they had to check other currency wallets and pay an exchange fee. The goal was to minimize the exchange fee.

Round 3: Technical Interview (System Design)
The interviewer presented two scenarios: User -> booking system -> hotel (payment handled by booking system) and Booking passes payment info to hotel (hotel responsible for payment). The candidate had to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both methods. For the actual design, the task was to design a system that handles different payment schemes (e.g., 20% upfront, 50% on check-in, 30% on check-out) using a third-party payment gateway that accepts card details and debits the card. The system also needed to handle payment history.

Round 4: Cultural Fit Interview
This round was with an engineering manager and consisted of general behavioral questions, such as "what would you do?" or "describe a situation?". No technical questions were asked in this round.