I applied for an SDE2 role on booking.com's careers page around January. The recruiter reached out to me in May. By February, I had already moved to another company, but I decided to go through with the interview process. My primary motivation was to gain more interview practice and, of course, to collect and share the interview questions with the community here.

HackerRank OA - Machine Coding

The online assessment involved a machine coding challenge. I was provided with a Spring Boot application template, where data was already populated in an h2 database. All the necessary JPA entities, such as Hotel and City, along with their corresponding repository classes, were pre-existing.

The specific tasks were:

1. Build basic CRUD APIs for the Hotel entity.
2. Implement an API to return the 3 closest hotels from a given city.
3. Write Unit Tests if they were required (I don't recall if I wrote them).

For calculating distances, the problem explicitly mentioned that Latitude and Longitude information for both City and Hotel would be available in their respective tables. It also suggested using the Haversine formula for distance calculation and even hinted that I could Google search for the formula.

Round 1 - System Design

This round focused on System Design. I was tasked with designing a Rating and Review System specifically for booking.com. The system needed to support a few key features:

• Allow users to search for and filter hotels based on their ratings.
• Enable users to rate a hotel.
• Provide functionality for users to add a review for a hotel.

Round 2 - DSA

This was the Data Structures and Algorithms round. The problem presented was to find all possible ways to spend a total budget given certain conditions.

Constraints:

1. A tourist must spend numDaysInEachCity consecutive days in a single city.
2. The total expenditure across all cities should not exceed totalBudget.

The input was provided in a JSON-like structure:

{
"numDaysInEachCity": 2,
"totalBudget": 390,
"pricesPerCity": {
"Paris": [10, 20, 50, 80, 100, 20],
"LA" : [90, 10, 40, 90, 12, 11],
"Amsterdam": [70, 20, 10, 30, 20, 80]
}
}

The expected output was a list of all possible valid expenditures. An example scenario was given: spending 2 days in Paris (10+20=30), 2 days in LA (40+90=130), and 2 days in Amsterdam (20+80=100), totaling 260, which is less than the totalBudget and thus should be included in the output.

Verdict

After the interviews, I was unfortunately ghosted. I didn't receive any feedback regarding my performance or the outcome. Since I didn't manage to solve the DSA round completely, I can only assume that I was rejected.

I applied online for a New Grad role at Booking.com, and the entire process took about 4 weeks. It started with an online HackerRank test, followed by a 20-minute behavioral phone interview. The final stage consisted of two separate 30-45 minute rounds, one with a Senior Software Engineer and another with an Engineering Manager, both focusing on behavioral questions and a deep dive into my past technical projects and internships.

I found the recruitment process to be very smooth, and my recruiter was incredibly helpful, providing prompt updates after each round. She consistently reached out one to two days after each round to check in on my experience, and the results from each round were delivered within 3-5 days.

I initially applied for an Amsterdam-based role but accepted a switch to Manchester, UK due to exciting developments happening there at the moment.