Booking Holdings

Role: Software Engineer

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: March 2025

Interview Type: Full-Time, Off-Campus (via referral)

Result: Rejected

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 3 rounds

Experience:

The candidate applied for a role at Booking Holdings via a referral. The interview process consisted of three rounds.

Round 1: HackerRank Developer Test
This was an online coding assessment where the candidate was provided with a GitHub repository. The task was to implement a few APIs, including one for fetching hotel details and some additional functionalities. The candidate, having prior Java experience, completed it in about 45 minutes and found it straightforward.

Round 2: In-Person Technical Interview (DSA + System Design)
This round was conducted at their Bangalore office with two interviewers.

• Data Structures & Algorithms: The problem was related to hotel reservations. Given booking data (e.g., u1 booked from 10 to 12, u2 booked from 11 to 14), the challenge was to find dates where the average number of bookings in the last seven days fell below a certain threshold (e.g., 30% or 60%). The suggested approach involved iterating over the data, computing a rolling average, and adding qualifying dates to a HashSet. The interviewers were satisfied with the solution's efficiency.
• System Design: The candidate was asked to design a hotel booking system. Discussions included database schema (tables for users, hotels, rooms, reservations), scalability (handling millions of bookings, sharding, indexing), and handling concurrent bookings. This discussion lasted 20-25 minutes.

Round 3: Cultural Fit Interview
This round was with the head of a particular team and was described as a casual conversation to assess personality, work style, and how the candidate handles challenges. Questions included: "Why do you want to join Booking Holdings?", "How do you handle tight deadlines and pressure?", "How do you work in a team setting?", and "Tell us about a time when you had a conflict at work and how you resolved it."

The candidate mentioned it "was a bad day," implying a rejection despite interest in the company.