Booking Holdings hires almost entirely through its operating brands, and the public writeups are dominated by Booking.com's Amsterdam engineering org and Agoda's Bangkok engineering org. The Booking.com loop is remarkably stable across a decade: a timed HackerRank screen, a recruiter call, an optional or mandatory live coding phone screen, then an onsite of algorithms (graph problems are near-universal), system design framed on a real travel-marketplace problem, and a closing 'cultural fit / commercial awareness' round where you are expected to reason about the business model and A/B testing. Agoda runs a longer, more segmented loop (coding, platform, architecture, culture fit) and adds a preliminary recruiter call mid-process, while Booking Holdings' newer Bangalore centre and the London/Manchester offices run shorter, more locally-flavoured variants.
These 24 writeups cover software engineering, data & science, mobile engineering and other roles. 20 of them were posted under a forum handle, so we could not verify the authors’ identities.
Experienced. 6 rounds. Shared by Gil Vegliach on blog, 2017-09-08
1HackerRank online assessmentOnline assessmentA 75-minute timed test of five coding challenges, four of them straightforward speed-and-accuracy exercises and one noticeably harder. He finished with time to spare.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
2Recruiter callPhone screenA motivations-and-history conversation in which the recruiter probed his interest in the commercial side of engineering and flagged that the backend was heavily Perl. A high assessment score let him skip the second video screen.Covered: Behavioral, Domain knowledge
3Onsite HR roundBehavioralA warm-up conversation at the Amsterdam office covering the same ground as the recruiter call, with a different recruiter.Covered: Behavioral, Resume deep-dive
4Algorithms with two engineersTechnicalOne problem solved on paper with two interviewers, harder than the online test but of a familiar textbook flavour. He described it as a graph problem.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
5System design with two engineersSystem designDesign a system at scale, with the interviewers looking for a structured approach: clarify requirements, estimate, lay out components, then go deep where they steer.Covered: System design, Scalability
6Principal engineer business roundFinalA discussion with a principal engineer about the business impact of his work, how he measures the value software creates, and the basics of A/B testing.Covered: Domain knowledge, Behavioral
Backend Developer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Received an offer
Experienced, Base 90k euros, 15% performance bonus, 20k USD stock over 3 years. 5 rounds. Shared by LeetCode Discuss (anonymous) on leetcode, 2021-08-10
1HackerRank assessmentOnline assessmentA timed coding test. He passed every case but one on the final question and waited about two weeks for a reply.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
2HR screeningPhone screenA recruiter conversation walking through his skills and ten years of experience.Covered: Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
3Onsite codingTechnicalA graph problem in the travel domain: rank the nearest hotels to a starting point.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
4System designSystem designDesign a system to detect bookings paid for with fraudulent credit cards, the same scenario another candidate reported a year earlier.Covered: System design, Scalability
5Cultural fitBehavioralLeadership-principle style questions plus commercial awareness and how he would validate a feature with an A/B test.Covered: Behavioral, Domain knowledge
Senior Software Engineer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Received an offer
Experienced. 6 rounds. Shared by carl-sagan on leetcode, 2020-12-21
1HackerRank screenOnline assessmentThree problems spanning easy to hard in 90 minutes. He cleared all cases in under an hour.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
2Recruiter phone screenPhone screenQuestions on seniority, leadership and motivation for the move, plus a walk through his past projects.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects
3Coding phone screenTechnicalTwo medium problems in an hour, both about traversing map-like graph structures.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
4Onsite system designSystem designDesign a scalable log-harvesting system for the company's internal infrastructure.Covered: System design, Scalability
5Onsite codingTechnicalA medium problem on directed graphs with a hard follow-up.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
6BehavioralBehavioralMotivation, prior experience and his history of mentoring other engineers.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects
1HackerRank testOnline assessmentThree problems in 90 minutes: a priority-queue exercise, a grid shortest-path problem and the recurring top-k-hotels ranking question.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Graphs
2Onsite technical 1TechnicalA layered graph problem about routing a trip across cities under a budget cap and returning to the origin. The interviewers cared more about direction and interaction than a complete solution.Covered: Graphs, Dynamic programming
3System designSystem designDesign around a shared external inventory service that multiple travel sites query for room availability, focusing on avoiding double-booking, propagating updates and keeping the design extensible.Covered: System design, Concurrency, API design
4Culture fitBehavioralTwo engineering managers asked about his current role, how he handles disagreement with a manager or teammate, and how he approaches an incident raised while on call.Covered: Behavioral, Conflict handling
1HackerRank roundOnline assessmentThe same standard timed coding test other candidates reported. He cleared every case and heard back within a week.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
2HR screeningPhone screenSkills, experience and why he wanted to move to the company.Covered: Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
3Virtual onsite codingTechnicalA breadth-first shortest-path problem on a board, with a follow-up asking him to reconstruct and print the path.Covered: Graphs, Data structures & algorithms
4System designSystem designDesign the loyalty-tier programme: an API that decides whether a given user qualifies for the company's frequent-traveller status.Covered: System design, API design
5Cultural fitBehavioralA long behavioural round with an emphasis on commercial awareness.Covered: Behavioral, Domain knowledge
1HackerRank online assessmentOnline assessmentThree problems in 90 minutes, one easy and two medium, including the recurring hotel-ranking question.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
2Behavioural phone interviewPhone screenA short twenty-minute screen focused on standard behavioural ground.Covered: Behavioral
3Final interview with a senior engineerTechnicalA half-hour session mixing behavioural questions with a dive into university projects and internships.Covered: Past projects, Behavioral
4Final interview with an engineering managerHiring managerThe same shape as the previous round, run separately by the hiring manager.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects
1Coding challenge and cognitive assessmentOnline assessmentA coding exercise paired with a take-home reasoning test covering logical, analytical and problem-solving ability.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Aptitude
2Recruiter phone screeningPhone screenA recruiter conversation working through the details on her CV.Covered: Resume deep-dive
3Assessment centreAssessment centreAn in-person day opening with a presentation, then a behavioural interview, a technical interview solving a realistic problem with two senior developers, a group exercise and lunch with the team. The offer followed this day.Covered: Behavioral, Data structures & algorithms
Software Engineer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Received an offer
Experienced. 4 rounds. Shared by pedroxido on leetcode, 2021-01-07
1HR callPhone screenA half-hour walk through his CV and the role, including the salary band and benefits.Covered: Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
2Technical phone interviewTechnicalHis prospective manager and a peer each set one problem: detecting elements repeated above a threshold, and scoring a hotel review as positive, negative or neutral against word lists. Both were solvable with hash maps and sets.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
3Onsite codingTechnicalNot a puzzle-style question: a long data-transformation exercise where the real work was understanding what the required output represented, with time left for follow-ups and complexity analysis.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Graphs
4System designSystem designDetermine whether a user qualifies for premium status, given stated constraints. He rated this his worst-ever interview: the two interviewers repeatedly cut him off and contradicted their own steer, and he said he would decline an offer over it.Covered: System design, API design
Software Engineer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Not selected
Experienced. 4 rounds. Shared by omarsafwany on leetcode, 2019-05-31
1HackerRank online taskOnline assessmentFour problems in 75 minutes, mostly easy with one medium and one hard.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
2HR phone interviewPhone screenResume walkthrough, motivation for joining and willingness to relocate.Covered: Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
3Technical phone interviewTechnicalTwo engineers set two problems. Complexity analysis was explicitly probed, and the format required coding while on the call.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
4Onsite day in AmsterdamPanelFour back-to-back sessions: a short HR warm-up, an hour of algorithms with two engineers, an hour of system design with two more, and a commercial round with a project manager asking him to propose an improvement to the product and explain how he would measure its success. Lunch with a non-interviewing employee closed the day. Flights and four nights of accommodation were covered.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design, Domain knowledge
Experienced, Base 75k euros, 15% annual performance bonus, 200 euros/month transport allowance, bicycle budget, relocation support. 4 rounds. Shared by live-wire on leetcode, 2019-05-27
1HackerRank exerciseOnline assessmentFour questions in an hour and a quarter, split evenly between easy and medium.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
2Recruiter phone screenPhone screenAn hour-long discussion of his work history.Covered: Resume deep-dive
3Technical phone screenTechnicalTwo medium algorithm problems in a shared editor.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
4Onsite in AmsterdamPanelFour sessions: a recruiter chat, an algorithms round with two engineers, a system design round with two engineers that he flagged as the decisive one, and a cultural fit round with a single engineer.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design, Behavioral
1HackerRank online assessmentOnline assessmentA two-hour timed exercise building REST endpoints in a Java web framework and pushing the working code to the repository, rather than a puzzle test.Covered: API design, Testing
2Onsite DSATechnicalNinety minutes on a permutation-generation problem and its variations.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
3System designSystem designDesign the payments layer of the booking flow across multiple gateways and card options, including split payment at check-in versus check-out, with discussion of payment service providers.Covered: System design, API design, Domain knowledge
4Hiring managerHiring managerMostly prior work experience and behavioural questions.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects
Senior Data Engineer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Not selected
Experienced. 5 rounds. Shared by andy_l20066 on leetcode, 2024-01-23
1HackerRank testOnline assessmentTwo questions: a query requiring awkward joins, and a coding problem aggregating hotel data.Covered: SQL, Data structures & algorithms
2HR video callPhone screenIntroductions, motivation, and an early conversation about salary and the type of work.Covered: Behavioral, Resume deep-dive
3Live codingTechnicalA medium-difficulty problem over hotel data involving aggregation and windowing. The interviewer accepted an incomplete but running solution because the reasoning was clear.Covered: SQL, Data structures & algorithms
4Data system designSystem designDesign a hotel data store serving both batch and real-time queries, with follow-ups on database choice, deployment and how consumers would query it.Covered: System design, Scalability, DBMS
5Hiring managerHiring managerPurely behavioural: handling conflict, reacting when a colleague is doing something wrong, dealing with disagreement. It was rescheduled repeatedly and landed about two months after being offered.Covered: Behavioral, Conflict handling
Android Engineer (Booking.com, London)
Received an offer
Experienced, Total compensation around 108,500 pounds (base plus RSUs plus target bonus). 3 rounds. Shared by LeetCode Discuss (anonymous) on leetcode, 2022-09-30
1Recruiter screening callPhone screenAn inbound approach on LinkedIn followed by a screening call, with interviews booked about two weeks out.Covered: Resume deep-dive
2Behavioural and culture interviewBehavioralSituational questions and a discussion of prior projects, closing with a high-level architecture sketch of a system he had built before.Covered: Behavioral, Past projects, System design
3Android pairing interviewTechnicalAn hour of pair programming inside a supplied Android codebase: refactor it, add features using a layered presentation architecture and reactive streams, and improve testability with unit tests.Covered: Low-level design, OOP, Testing
1Pair-programming phone technicalTechnicalThree engineers joined for an hour and set two problems: simulating text edited with backspaces, and an efficient way to pull the most recent window of entries out of a huge unsorted log file.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
2Recruiter feedback callPhone screenThe recruiter relayed feedback and issued the invitation to Amsterdam.Covered: Behavioral
3Onsite recruiter roundBehavioralA slot for the candidate's own HR questions.Covered: Behavioral
4Onsite codingTechnicalA single 40-minute problem over nested room-inventory data: given a date range and required amenities, produce the combined prices, feature sets and availability for the matching stays.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
5System designSystem designTwo engineers asked him to design fraud detection over roughly a million daily reservations, accounting for both payment models (the platform charging the card versus passing card details to the property) and an external feed of known-bad cards.Covered: System design, Scalability, Domain knowledge
Experienced. 1 round. Shared by fixFwd on leetcode, 2021-02-22
1Technical phone screenTechnicalTwo interviewers each set a verbosely worded, non-puzzle problem in a shared pad: finding cities where the same hotel name recurs above a threshold, and an in-place word-reversal variant. He solved both but missed an edge case.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
Software Engineer (Booking.com, Amsterdam)
Received an offer
Experienced. 3 rounds. Shared by marblecake on hn, 2014-08-25
1HR screening callPhone screenA short recruiter screen.Covered: Resume deep-dive
2Technical phone interviewTechnicalA telephone technical round booked a couple of days after the screen.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
3Onsite in AmsterdamPanelThree back-to-back technical rounds followed by a walk around the office floor. The offer was made the same day. He joined partly because of how fast and pleasant the process was.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design
Front-end Engineer (Booking.com)
Not selected
Experienced. 1 round. Shared by Brajeshwar on hn, 2021-12-11
1Technical phone screenPhone screenThe call went technical immediately with recall-style questions on CSS defaults. He could not answer from memory, offered to walk through his open-source layout library and the box model instead, ran out of time and was rejected.Covered: Debugging, OOP
1DSA interviewTechnicalNot a conventional algorithms round: he was asked to model something close to a banking system using object-oriented principles in Java, plus a motivation question.Covered: OOP, Low-level design
2System designSystem designDesign a location-sharing product, with most of the hour spent on the data model and on constraints like restricting who can see a location by time and place.Covered: System design, DBMS
4Architecture / platform designSystem designA large-scale messaging system design.Covered: System design, Scalability
5Culture fit with the hiring managerHiring managerA low-level design exercise (an elevator controller) wrapped in behavioural questioning about motivation and reasons for leaving.Covered: Low-level design, Behavioral
Senior Software Engineer (Agoda, Bangkok)
Received an offer
Experienced. 7 rounds. Shared by Vikash Kumar on blog, 2025-11-12
1Prep callPhone screenA fifteen-minute talent-acquisition call laying out the full sequence of five interviews up front.Covered: Behavioral
2CodingTechnicalAn hour in a hosted coding environment on problems blending algorithmic thinking with production-style concerns: efficient data processing, modular code and edge cases.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, Testing
3Front-end platformTechnicalFront-end architecture rather than framework trivia: component reuse, state management, handling API data and render optimisation, with detailed follow-ups on his choices. Strong performance here bumped him onto a more senior track and added an extra round.Covered: Low-level design, API design, Debugging
4Preliminary callPhone screenA half-hour recruiter conversation on the remaining rounds, notice period, relocation and compensation expectations.Covered: Behavioral
5ArchitectureSystem designEnd-to-end design and review of a system, covering simplicity-versus-performance trade-offs, code review practice and how the design would evolve under growth.Covered: System design, Scalability, Testing
6Backend platformSystem designA practical case set in a hotel booking system, focused on locating and fixing performance bottlenecks.Covered: System design, Scalability, Domain knowledge
7Culture fitBehavioralThe closing hour-long values and fit conversation.Covered: Behavioral
1Recruiter callPhone screenA 45-minute video call about the role, relocation benefits, his current work and expectations.Covered: Behavioral
2CodingTechnicalSeventy-five minutes on a compound string problem judged against a hidden test suite with a stated pass threshold. The interviewer pushed back hard on his approach. He ran out of time on an out-of-bounds case and was rejected a few days later.Covered: Arrays & strings, Data structures & algorithms
Tech Lead Data Engineer (Agoda, Bangkok)
Outcome not shared
Experienced. 6 rounds. Shared by prem12 on leetcode, 2024-11-10
1System designSystem designAn hour designing a search-ranking data platform: scalable data models for ranking and recommendation, freshness, partitioning and caching for real-time queries, and distributed pipelines feeding a ranking model.Covered: System design, Scalability, DBMS
2Behavioural and technical discussionBehavioralNinety minutes covering leadership, mentoring and cross-functional delivery alongside ETL frameworks, SQL and pipeline efficiency.Covered: Behavioral, SQL
3Onsite system designSystem designA deeper architectural session concentrating on latency and data consistency.Covered: System design, Scalability
4Onsite algorithmsTechnicalAlgorithmic questions framed around efficient data processing.Covered: Data structures & algorithms
5Data engineering practicalTechnicalA hands-on scenario on cleaning, transforming and aggregating data.Covered: SQL, Debugging
6Team fit and leadershipHiring managerForty-five minutes on cultural alignment, collaboration and leading a team.Covered: Behavioral, Conflict handling
Backend Engineer (Agoda, Bangkok)
Received an offer
Experienced. 4 rounds. Shared by Freeze Francis on blog, 2021-08-15
1Resume shortlistingPhone screenHe applied through LinkedIn and was shortlisted, though he had accidentally applied to a mobile role rather than backend.Covered: Resume deep-dive
3Two remote technical interviewsTechnicalTwo video technical rounds before the onsite stage.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design
4Four onsite technical roundsPanelFour in-person technical sessions in Bangkok, followed by the offer stage. He described the overall process as lengthy.Covered: Data structures & algorithms, System design, Behavioral
Product Owner
Not selected
Experienced, Brazil (remote for a Europe-based role). 2 rounds. Shared by David Pereira on youtube
1Recruiter conversationPhone screenA straightforward call with the recruiter who first reached out on LinkedIn, focused on personality, cultural fit, and willingness to relocate to Europe.Covered: Behavioral, Domain knowledge
2Technical product interviewTechnicalA deeper product interview with a product manager covering product discovery, segmented/A-B testing, and customer journey. The candidate could not answer roughly half of the questions.Covered: Domain knowledge, Customer scenarios
Product Manager (Fintech, Order-to-Cash)
Received an offer
Experienced, Bangalore, India (Booking Holdings India Center of Excellence), ~30-35% base hike over Microsoft. Comp split into base, 0-50% bonus, and stock (~$20,000, fixed globally, vested over 3 years). Plus relocation support and a joining stock award. 5 rounds. Shared by Sugat Nayak on youtube
1Recruiter screenPhone screenShort call to understand the candidate's background, prior companies, and familiarity with the role before moving the process forward. Reached via an employee referral.Covered: Past projects, Domain knowledge
2Hiring manager screenHiring managerA 30-minute round where the candidate picked one project and walked through it end to end: how the idea was conceived, pitched to leadership, researched, specced, and executed with partner teams. This walk-through template recurred in later rounds.Covered: Past projects, Resume deep-dive
3Case/craft roundCase studyA case/craft round with a group PM heading a sub business unit, evaluating actual work done: how projects were picked up, how the backlog was prioritized, and how planning and resourcing happened.Covered: Past projects, Customer scenarios
4Case/craft roundCase studyA second, similarly structured case/craft round with another group PM, again grounded in the candidate's real project experience rather than abstract product questions.Covered: Past projects, Customer scenarios
5Final roundFinalFinal round with the hiring manager and a team PM: a project deep-dive plus a pure product-design case (designing a product, e.g. a refrigerator for blind people).Covered: Past projects, Case study
What Booking Holdings is hiring for now
21 open roles in our index. Advertised pay floors run $135k to $225k (median $185k, from 20 postings that state pay).
What is the interview process like at Booking Holdings?
Booking Holdings hires almost entirely through its operating brands, and the public writeups are dominated by Booking.com's Amsterdam engineering org and Agoda's Bangkok engineering org. The Booking.com loop is remarkably stable across a decade: a timed HackerRank screen, a recruiter call, an optional or mandatory live coding phone screen, then an onsite of algorithms (graph problems are near-universal), system design framed on a real travel-marketplace problem, and a closing 'cultural fit / commercial awareness' round where you are expected to reason about the business model and A/B testing. Agoda runs a longer, more segmented loop (coding, platform, architecture, culture fit) and adds a preliminary recruiter call mid-process, while Booking Holdings' newer Bangalore centre and the London/Manchester offices run shorter, more locally-flavoured variants.
What topics does Booking Holdings test in interviews?
Commonly reported topics include Data structures & algorithms, Graphs, System design, Scalability, API design, Behavioral.
These guides summarize public, first-hand interview experiences shared by candidates. They describe the shape of each loop and the topics that came up, not a leaked question bank, and every experience links back to its original source. Processes change often. Treat this as directional prep, not a script.
TheJobsMap