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 22 writeups cover software engineering, data & science, mobile engineering and other roles. 18 of them were posted under a pseudonym (Reddit, GeeksforGeeks or forum handles), so we could not verify the authors’ identities.
Typical rounds
4.21-7 range
Outcomes shared
15/6offer / not
Most common round
Technical
Sources span
2014 - 2025
Most frequently reported · Behavioral(19), Data structures & algorithms(19), System design(17), Resume deep-dive(11), Scalability(8)
Booking Holdings’s official process
Booking.com's own careers site describes a screening call with a sourcer or recruiter covering career history and interest in the role, followed by several interview rounds with the hiring manager, teammates and colleagues. It states most interviews worldwide are held online and that the process typically runs 3-6 weeks, longer for technical roles that add a technical test and coding interviews. A company blog post on the graduate software engineering route additionally describes an assessment centre made up of an introductory presentation, a behavioural interview, a technical interview and a group exercise. Agoda publishes a parallel guide (careersatagoda.com/interview/) describing a CAR-structured competency approach plus 'Coding and Algorithms' and 'Platform' technical rounds.
19 open roles in our index · advertised pay floors run $134k-$203k (median $185k, from 14 postings that state pay).
Most-posted roles
Data Sharing Manager1
Director, Global Investigations1
Financial Crime Risk Senior Manager, B2B1
Global Sr Enterprise Security Architect (Director level)1
Head of B2B Marketing1
Corporate Governance Paralegal1
Top locations
Norwalk9
New York City5
London1
Commonly tested topics
Data structures & algorithms·Graphs·System design·Scalability·API design·Behavioral·Domain knowledge·SQL·Low-level design·OOP·Past projects·Conflict handling
Interview experiences at Booking Holdings
Outcome
Seniority
Software Development Engineer (Booking.com)
Experienced
Received an offer6 rounds
1
HackerRank online assessmentOnline assessment
A 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
2
Recruiter callPhone screen
A 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
3
Onsite HR roundBehavioral
A warm-up conversation at the Amsterdam office covering the same ground as the recruiter call, with a different recruiter.
Covered · Behavioral, Resume deep-dive
4
Algorithms with two engineersTechnical
One 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
5
System design with two engineersSystem design
Design 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
6
Principal engineer business roundFinal
A 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.
Three 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
2
Onsite technical 1Technical
A 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
3
System designSystem design
Design 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
4
Culture fitBehavioral
Two 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.
Coding challenge and cognitive assessmentOnline assessment
A coding exercise paired with a take-home reasoning test covering logical, analytical and problem-solving ability.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms, Aptitude
2
Recruiter phone screeningPhone screen
A recruiter conversation working through the details on her CV.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
3
Assessment centreAssessment centre
An 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
A half-hour walk through his CV and the role, including the salary band and benefits.
Covered · Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
2
Technical phone interviewTechnical
His 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
3
Onsite codingTechnical
Not 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
4
System designSystem design
Determine 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.
Four problems in 75 minutes, mostly easy with one medium and one hard.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
2
HR phone interviewPhone screen
Resume walkthrough, motivation for joining and willingness to relocate.
Covered · Resume deep-dive, Behavioral
3
Technical phone interviewTechnical
Two engineers set two problems; complexity analysis was explicitly probed, and the format required coding while on the call.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
4
Onsite day in AmsterdamPanel
Four 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
Received an offerBase 75k euros, 15% annual performance bonus, 200 euros/month transport allowance, bicycle budget, relocation support4 rounds
1
HackerRank exerciseOnline assessment
Four questions in an hour and a quarter, split evenly between easy and medium.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
2
Recruiter phone screenPhone screen
An hour-long discussion of his work history.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
3
Technical phone screenTechnical
Two medium algorithm problems in a shared editor.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
4
Onsite in AmsterdamPanel
Four 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
A 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
2
Onsite DSATechnical
Ninety minutes on a permutation-generation problem and its variations.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms, Arrays & strings
3
System designSystem design
Design 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
4
Hiring managerHiring manager
Mostly prior work experience and behavioural questions.
Two questions: a query requiring awkward joins, and a coding problem aggregating hotel data.
Covered · SQL, Data structures & algorithms
2
HR video callPhone screen
Introductions, motivation, and an early conversation about salary and the type of work.
Covered · Behavioral, Resume deep-dive
3
Live codingTechnical
A 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
4
Data system designSystem design
Design 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
5
Hiring managerHiring manager
Purely 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.
Received an offerTotal compensation around 108,500 pounds (base plus RSUs plus target bonus)3 rounds
1
Recruiter screening callPhone screen
An inbound approach on LinkedIn followed by a screening call, with interviews booked about two weeks out.
Covered · Resume deep-dive
2
Behavioural and culture interviewBehavioral
Situational 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
3
Android pairing interviewTechnical
An 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.
Three 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
2
Recruiter feedback callPhone screen
The recruiter relayed feedback and issued the invitation to Amsterdam.
Covered · Behavioral
3
Onsite recruiter roundBehavioral
A slot for the candidate's own HR questions.
Covered · Behavioral
4
Onsite codingTechnical
A 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
5
System designSystem design
Two 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
Two 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
A telephone technical round booked a couple of days after the screen.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
3
Onsite in AmsterdamPanel
Three 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
The 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.
Not 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
2
System designSystem design
Design 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
3
Recruiter feedback callPhone screen
A mid-process check-in relaying feedback and confirming expectations.
Covered · Behavioral
4
Architecture / platform designSystem design
A large-scale messaging system design.
Covered · System design, Scalability
5
Culture fit with the hiring managerHiring manager
A low-level design exercise (an elevator controller) wrapped in behavioural questioning about motivation and reasons for leaving.
A fifteen-minute talent-acquisition call laying out the full sequence of five interviews up front.
Covered · Behavioral
2
CodingTechnical
An 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
3
Front-end platformTechnical
Front-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
4
Preliminary callPhone screen
A half-hour recruiter conversation on the remaining rounds, notice period, relocation and compensation expectations.
Covered · Behavioral
5
ArchitectureSystem design
End-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
6
Backend platformSystem design
A practical case set in a hotel booking system, focused on locating and fixing performance bottlenecks.
Covered · System design, Scalability, Domain knowledge
7
Culture fitBehavioral
The closing hour-long values and fit conversation.
A 45-minute video call about the role, relocation benefits, his current work and expectations.
Covered · Behavioral
2
CodingTechnical
Seventy-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
An 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
2
Behavioural and technical discussionBehavioral
Ninety minutes covering leadership, mentoring and cross-functional delivery alongside ETL frameworks, SQL and pipeline efficiency.
Covered · Behavioral, SQL
3
Onsite system designSystem design
A deeper architectural session concentrating on latency and data consistency.
Covered · System design, Scalability
4
Onsite algorithmsTechnical
Algorithmic questions framed around efficient data processing.
Covered · Data structures & algorithms
5
Data engineering practicalTechnical
A hands-on scenario on cleaning, transforming and aggregating data.
Covered · SQL, Debugging
6
Team fit and leadershipHiring manager
Forty-five minutes on cultural alignment, collaboration and leading a team.
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.