I applied through a Booking.com recruiter.

The process took 4 weeks.

I interviewed at Booking.com (Amsterdam, Netherlands) in September 2015.

I had around 6-7 rounds of interviews, covering technical, HR, and cultural fit assessments.

Overall, the workplace and interviewers seemed pretty good. The interviews were well-balanced.

Started with a HackerRank session (5 questions, 90 mins) – not very hard. After that, 6 rounds of interviews:

• HR round: To understand interest level, work experience, and knowledge about Booking.com.
• Technical round: Pair programming on a shared code-collaborator environment with 2 programming questions (basic array and hash questions).

Invited to Amsterdam for a face-to-face interview:

• HR round: For answering any questions, salary discussions, etc.
• Technical round: Design Graphite from scratch, evolving the designed system to handle scaling scenarios.
• Technical round: 2 problems:
  • Retweet Twitter tweets if a newer one is an anagram of an older one.
  • 20 boxes, each with 500 GB log files. No processing on the server file; aggregate data on one box and parse for phone numbers (bookings) efficiently.
• Technical and Culture fit round: Discussed various scenarios encountered during work and how you would behave in them.
• HR round: Offer! The offer had very low pay considering the high cost of living in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Declined the offer.

(Note: The following items appear to be duplicates from earlier in the text and have been omitted to avoid redundancy.)

HR round - to understand interest level, work experience and knowledge about Booking.com

Retweet twitter tweets if newer one is an anagram of older one.

20 boxes - 500 GB log files on each - no processing box on server file, aggregate data on one box and parse for phone numbers - bookings. Efficiently.