Booking.com interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Booking.com software engineering interview across 2 levels and 9 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Booking.com salary & ratings · All interview processes

Technology Intern (Software Engineering) — Booking Holdings India COE, Bengaluru

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: 6-12 months

  1. Round 0: Online Aptitude Test (campus-drive variant)

    Assessment · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank

  2. Round 1: HackerRank Online Coding Assessment

    Assessment · ~90 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Award Top K Hotels — Given a space-separated list of positive keywords and a list of negative keywords, plus parallel arrays of hotel IDs and their review texts, score each hotel by scanning every review word (single words only, case-insensitive): +3 for each occurrence of a positive keyword and -1 for each negative keyword. Return the top K hotel IDs sorted by total score descending, breaking ties by smaller ID first.

  3. Round 2: Technical Coding Interview (in-person, Bangalore office)

    Onsite · ~60-75 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Minimum Sum with K Operations — Given an array of integers, perform exactly K operations. Each operation removes the current maximum element and replaces it with floor(max/2). Return the minimum possible total sum of the array after the K operations.

  4. Round 3: Panel / Cultural-Fit (Behavioral) Round

    Behavioral · ~60 minutes · difficulty 1/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Software Engineer (SDE / SE2)

Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 month

  1. Round 0: Recruiter / HR Screen

    Phone · ~20-30 min · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank)

    Assessment · ~45 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Award Top K Hotels (Top K Frequent Elements) — Given a stream/array of hotel identifiers (or elements) and an integer k, return the k most frequently occurring ones. Booking frames this as 'award/rank the top K hotels' by booking count. Must beat O(n log n) full sort; expected O(n log k) or O(n) bucket sort.

  3. Round 2: Technical Coding / DSA (live)

    Onsite · 5 hours · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Maximum Subarray (Kadane's Algorithm) — Given an integer array (e.g. daily profit/loss numbers), find the contiguous subarray with the largest sum and return that sum. Expected O(n) single-pass Kadane solution; interviewer will ask for the running-max recurrence and its complexity.

  4. Round 3: System Design

    System_design · ~1 hour · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design a Hotel Rating and Review System — Design a scalable system that lets guests submit ratings/reviews for hotels and lets users read aggregated ratings and paginated reviews. Discuss data model, write path (moderation, spam/abuse), read path (aggregate score caching, sort-by-recency/helpfulness), storage choice, sharding by hotel, and keeping aggregate ratings consistent at Booking's global scale.

  5. Round 4: Behavioral / Hiring Manager

    Behavioral · ~1 hour · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.