Agoda | Staff Engineer | Bangkok | [Reject]
Summary
I interviewed for a Staff Engineer role at Agoda in Bangkok and was rejected after the coding and system design rounds.
Full Experience
I interviewed for Agoda. These were the rounds
Round 1 - Coding
Reassign priorities input: [1,4,8,4] output: [1,2,3,2] Solved using treemap and hashset
Molecule Weight Calculator Given 3 atoms with weights (C -> 12, H -> 1, O -> 8), you're given a chemical formula. Need to compute the total weight. e.g CH4 = 16, H(CH4)2 = 33 Solved using Stack based approach.
Round 2 - platform
improve this system
like adding gateway , rate limiting , horizontal scalling , DB replication , ideomptency , low latency , avoiding contenation using distributed locks
code review based on solid principles , desing patterns etc
got reject email after 2 days
i thought i did well on round 2 in terms of desing but did not specify few obvious improvement on apis
like POST /promo/updatestaus was given , instead of put
create api was missing
TIP : make sure go thro agoda prepation document provided , communicate your thought process proprely .
Interview Questions (2)
Reassign Priorities
Given an input array of integers, produce an output array where each element is replaced by its rank (starting from 1) in the sorted order of the unique values.
Example: Input: [1,4,8,4] Output: [1,2,3,2]
The candidate solved this using a TreeMap and a HashSet.
Molecule Weight Calculator
Given atomic weights for three atoms (C = 12, H = 1, O = 8) and a chemical formula string, compute the total molecular weight.
Examples:
- CH4 = 16
- H(CH4)2 = 33
The candidate used a stack‑based approach to handle nested parentheses and multipliers.
Preparation Tips
Make sure to go through the Agoda preparation document and clearly communicate your thought process during the interview.