Booking Holdings

Role: Backend Engineer

College: Not Specified (Working in a midsize Indian based product company)

Interview Date: February 2022

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Selected (Offer)

Difficulty: Not Specified

Rounds: 5 rounds (HackerRank, HR Screening, Virtual Onsite Coding, System Design, Cultural Fit)

Experience:

The candidate applied for a Backend Engineer role in Amsterdam via the careers portal in January. They had approximately 4.5 years of experience.

Round 1: HackerRank
The HackerRank round was similar to a previous one the candidate had encountered, and they cleared all test cases, receiving a response within one week.

Round 2: HR Screening
This round focused on the candidate's skills, experience, and motivation to join Booking.com.

Round 3: Virtual Onsite Coding Round
This round involved a graph-based question using BFS & DFS, similar to the LeetCode problem "Minimum Knight Moves" (`https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-knight-moves/`). A follow-up question was to print the shortest path.

Round 4: System Design
The task was to design a service (API) that would return `True` if a user is a "Genius" member, similar to the Booking.com Genius program (`https://www.booking.com/genius.html`).

Round 5: Cultural Fit Interview
This round involved a lot of behavioral questions and assessed commercial awareness. The recruiter provided positive feedback the day after this round.