I received an interview call from Agoda directly through LinkedIn. The recruiter mentioned that there would be 5 rounds in total, starting with:

• Introductory round with HR
• Behavioural and cultural fit round with a Senior EM
• DS/Algo round (1 hour; 2 questions)
• System design
• Platform round
• Mix of technical and behavioural

As and if required: agenda not yet set.

In Round 1, my first impression of the interviewer was not very good. He was sitting at a beachside cafe and wearing beach attire. He did not seem interested at all in the interview. I was asked the following questions:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What has changed over the past 3 years?
• At first, the interviewer kept this open-ended, then clarified: what changed about you, what did you learn.
• One time you regret or could have done differently.
• Kanban vs. Scrum.
• What is one thing you picked up from retro meetings?
• What is high performance according to you, and how would you measure it?
• What is low performance?
• Give me an example of low performance.

I was told initially by HR that I would be asked some code review problems as well, but it was purely behavioral. One thing I disliked most about the interviewer was that he did not try to listen to my answers and was trying to cut in. He just wanted to ask more and more questions, or probably just get done with it.

Round 2 had a nice interviewer. He was calm and welcoming. He gave me the following problem:

You are given a list of flights data. Each flight data has several fields identifying a flight, including a supplier ID. A supplier is basically a vendor who is selling that flight ticket for a given price. There can be duplicate flights in that data which are being supplied by different suppliers. Identify all unique routes. The definition of a unique route was not clear at all. The interviewer just gave some examples but did not want to explain what a unique route was. Finally, after a lot of back-and-forth, it became clear that a unique route is basically a flight that is being served by one or many suppliers, with all suppliers bundled into one common CSV along with that flight data. This was quite confusing for me, but I still solved it. I just used a hashmap to hold all the flights data. The key I used was the string of all flight details. This way, for every new flight being added to the hashmap, the supplier would be added to the value array. Finally, by iterating over the hashmap keys and values, I could get the required "unique routes" in the desired output manner. I wrote the code in JS.

The follow-up was to find the best flight based on given constraints. Constraints included the lowest price. If prices were the same for two flights, pick the one with a higher booking history percentage (provided along with the flight data), and finally, break the tie using the lower value of the supplier ID. I was able to solve that too. But then the interviewer wanted me to use filter functions. I told him that there was no need for filtering since we had to check each constraint one by one and hence could use the short-circuiting of the OR operator. But he was not happy at this point. Rest everything went well.

Within 3 days, I got a rejection email. I don't know what went wrong, but this was upsetting for me. I believed my interview went really well.