HR Phone Screening, 15 minutes.

Discussion of your experience. What Booking.com does? How much they pay? Basic introduction from both sides.

Technical Interview, 45 minutes.

Over the phone. 2 algorithmic questions. Not very tricky, general ones. Discussion of pros and cons, time complexity.

After this, I was invited to Amsterdam for an onsite interview.

Technical/Algorithmic, 1 hour:

Interview with a panel of two people. Algorithmic question: first you solve, then discuss pros and cons of the approach, time complexity, and scaling. Seems they are trying to cover different areas of programming/computing around this question.

System Design/Business Case Implementation, 1 hour:

This is more about how you would take a real-life feature and implement it for Booking.com. Discussion around the impact of the feature, how you will measure success, and how you will implement it. A little open-ended.

Behavioral (I think), 1 hour:

With the team lead. This round is super vague, but I assume the intention is to measure cultural fit. More like how you tackled situations. Discussion about the organizational structure of Booking.com.

I was asked to leave, and after a week, I received an email saying they would not be extending an offer.

These below are personal observations from someone who didn't get the offer. There may be some bias here. Make your own judgment.

Office and workplace look decent. Work looks fuzzy; I think it's mostly implementing business features or modifying existing ones.

Apparently, these people are recruiting heavily due to growth, so there are a lot of interviews going on. It seems there is a very low ratio of proceeding to onsite interviews from the initial screening to receiving an offer. This seems like a bad filter. Whatever the case, it's Booking.com's decision if they want to spend money and time; that's their choice. However, if I have to spend half a week traveling and interviewing, I will think twice. Yes, you get to see Amsterdam, but I have seen it twice.

Also, the third interview (behavioral) mostly looks useless. I have been part of interviews that used to do that, but we had to stop because there is no uniform way of assessing it. In the end, it simply turns out to be the whim of the person conducting it.

Finding the Knight's Tour on a chessboard.

How will you implement auto-complete?