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Booking.com

Large Enterprises

Most of these Booking.com write-ups come from Software Engineers (10), then Product Managers (9) and Technical Program Managers (1). The most reported rounds are the product sense round (7), the technical phone screen (6), the system design round (3) and the hiring manager screen (2).

20 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Booking.com·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Aug 2026
Took the Booking Holdings online assessment and it was a mixed bag: 60 MCQs covering aptitude, OS scheduling, and some audio-based listening questions, plus two coding problems where the second one was a proper DP challenge that caught me off guard on time.
  • Solve a straightforward coding problem (easy difficulty).
  • Solve a hard dynamic programming coding problem.
  • Answer MCQ questions on OS scheduling concepts.
  • Answer aptitude questions including seating arrangements and basic math calculations.
  • Listen to an audio clip and answer comprehension-based questions about its content.

“Knocked this one out pretty fast which was a relief.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Booking for a software engineering role. The whole session was one big question about logging and telemetry infrastructure, and it went deep fast. Not a bad experience but they really pushed on the operational corners, not just the happy path.
  • Design a logging and telemetry system for a large application platform where many services emit log and metric events, writes are async, and users need real-time query access for debugging and dashboards.

“This one sprawled in every direction.”

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Booking.com·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Booking.com and got asked the classic 'what's the hardest part of being a PM' question. Not a lot to report beyond that one question.
  • What do you find most challenging about the Product Manager role?

“I went with the alignment angle, talking about getting engineering and design on the same page without any real authority.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Booking.com coding screen with a hotel reviews scoring problem. Not a typical LeetCode grind, more of a design-your-own-logic kind of thing, which I wasn't expecting.
  • You're given a list of hotels, each with reviews containing keywords. Some keywords are positive and some are negative. Aggregate keyword scores per hotel and return the top-K hotels by total score. You define the scoring weights and keyword detection logic yourself.

“The 'define it yourself' part is where I lost time.”

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Booking.com·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026
PM interview at Booking.com with a classic estimation question about cancellation rates. Short and focused, probably a screen or early-round case.
  • What do you think the global booking cancellation rate is at Booking.com, and why?

“This tripped me up more than it should have.”

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Booking.com·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
PM interview at Booking.com with a technical troubleshooting scenario. One question, pretty focused, felt more like a product ops problem than a pure strategy question.
  • You're a PM at Booking.com and a sales manager tells you the app is returning a 404 error. Walk through how you'd investigate.

“I went straight to triage mode: is this one user or widespread, which surface (web vs app vs API), recent deployments, that kind of thing.”

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Booking.com·Technical Program Manager·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
TPM interview at Booking.com with a system design component that asked me to literally draw out a system I'd owned. Not a whiteboard-in-the-abstract sense, more like walk me through something real you built.
  • Draw the system architecture for a program you owned. Walk through the components, how they interact, and the technical decisions behind the design.

“This one tripped me up more than I expected.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Booking.com for a software engineer role. The whole thing was one big design question about building a logging and metrics platform at scale, and it went pretty deep into every layer of the stack.
  • Design a logging and metrics system that handles billions of events per day from many internal services. Cover the full pipeline: how services emit events, how data gets ingested and buffered, how it's processed and aggregated, how it's stored across hot and cold tiers, and how the query layer serves real-time dashboards and alerts. Also address the tension between async fire-and-forget writes and the need for low-latency reads.

“This was a lot to hold in your head at once.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Booking's online assessment for the SWE role was 90 minutes, three questions, pretty standard algo stuff plus one problem that felt more domain-specific to what they actually do. Nothing too brutal but the third question had enough moving parts to eat up time if you weren't careful.
  • Given an array of strings, group all anagrams together.
  • Given a non-negative integer, return the maximum value you can get by swapping at most one pair of digits.
  • Given positive and negative keyword lists, a list of hotel reviews each tied to a hotel ID, and an integer k, return the top-k hotel IDs ranked by total sentiment score (ties broken by smaller ID first).

“Classic.”

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Booking.com·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
PM interview at Booking.com with a product design question that had nothing to do with travel, which threw me off more than I expected.
  • How would you design a smart lock product for Google?

“Nothing in my prep pointed toward hardware or IoT and here comes a smart lock question.”

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Booking.com interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Booking.com interview?

Candidates most often report a product sense round (7 write-ups), a technical phone screen (6), a system design round (3) and a hiring manager screen (2).