Booking.com Software Engineer interview questions

10 Software Engineers have shared notes from their Booking.com interviews, with the questions they were asked in each round. That is 50% of the 20 Booking.com interview notes on Screna AI.

10 Software Engineer interview notes

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·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·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·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Booking.com software engineer interview with a data-matching problem that sounds straightforward but has a few wrinkles worth thinking through ahead of time.
  • You have two unsorted lists, one of bookings and one of payments. Each payment record references a booking by ID. For each booking, figure out whether at least one payment exists for it. What does your output look like and how do you approach it?
  • How would your solution change if a single booking could have multiple payment records associated with it?

“The output format question tripped me up more than the logic itself.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Did a technical screen for a software engineer role at Booking.com. Mix of low-level CS fundamentals and higher-level system design questions, which felt a bit scattered but not brutal. Some of it was surprisingly basic.
  • What is the difference between heap and stack memory?
  • How do Protobuf and JSON compare as serialization formats?
  • How does gRPC differ from traditional RPC approaches?
  • In what situations would you use event streaming like Kafka?
  • When should you use a table join in SQL?
  • What does SQL stand for?
  • What does CI/CD stand for?

“Classic CS fundamentals question.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Booking.com coding screen, pretty much just the classic group anagrams problem. Nothing too wild but it's the kind of question that feels easy until you're actually writing it out under pressure.
  • Given an array of strings, group all anagrams together and return the groups in any order.

“I knew the sorted-key hashmap approach pretty much immediately, sort each string, use it as a key, bucket the originals under it.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Booking.com software engineering interview with a coding problem centered on payment reconciliation logic. The problem looked straightforward at first but the edge cases are where it gets interesting.
  • Given a list of bookings (each with an id and an amount due) and a list of payments (each referencing a booking id and a paid amount), compute the total payments per booking and classify each booking as PAID, UNPAID, UNDERPAID, or OVERPAID. Return a mapping from booking id to status.

“My first instinct was to nest loops and I caught myself before writing it out, which felt like a small win.”

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Booking.com·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Got a coding question from Booking.com that looked straightforward on the surface. One swap, maximize the number. Took me longer than I'd like to admit to get the logic clean.
  • Given an integer, you're allowed to swap any two of its digits at most once. Return the largest possible number you can form.

“My first instinct was greedy and I think that's the right call, but I fumbled the implementation for a bit.”

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