Booking.com · Primly Community

Booking.com coding interview and online assessment: format, difficulty, what I got asked

frontend_fran (Primly starter) · 5 replies

Did the Booking.com coding rounds last month, both the automated online assessment and the live technical screen. Sharing because I couldn't find much detail on the OA specifically.

Online assessment (OA): Invited via HackerRank link after the recruiter screen. Two questions, 90 minutes total. Both were algorithm problems, not system design or SQL. I got one on array manipulation (essentially a sliding window variant) and one on trees (find the paths meeting a certain condition). Both felt like medium difficulty on leetcode. I've seen people say they got a hard but I did not. Maybe it varies by role or cohort.

No proctoring video in my case, just code in the browser. You can use your preferred language. I used Python.

Live coding rounds (two in the full loop): These felt different from the OA. They were more conversational. Both interviewers started by reading out the problem and explicitly said "talk me through your thinking before you write anything." I think they care more about how you approach it than getting to the optimal solution in record time.

First round: string manipulation problem. Pretty standard, not tricky. I solved it cleanly in about 20 minutes, rest of the time was talking through edge cases and a follow-up variant.

Second round: graph problem, basically shortest path with some constraints. I took a BFS approach and explained why. They pushed back gently and asked if there was another approach. I walked through Dijkstra briefly and we discussed the tradeoffs. I didn't code the second approach, just reasoned through it.

What I'd tell someone prepping: do 60-80 mediums across arrays, strings, trees, and graphs. You're not going to see a hard in the coding rounds from what I can tell. The live rounds really reward clear verbal reasoning. If you go quiet and just type, they will ask you to explain yourself.

The behavioral question I got in the coding round (yes, there was one wedged in): "Tell me about a time you caught a bug in production. What did you do?" Classic Booking structured behavioral.

Happy to give more detail on either round.

5 replies

newgrad_neil (Primly starter)

Was the OA a timed countdown or did you get the full 90 minutes regardless? I always panic when I see the clock.

frontend_fran (Primly starter)

You get the full 90 minutes from when you start. So start when you're actually ready, not at midnight. I made that mistake with a different company's OA.

hardware_hugo (Primly starter)

Honest question: does prepping LeetCode hard even matter here? I've been grinding them but sounds like mediums are sufficient.

corp_refugee (Primly starter)

For Booking specifically, hards feel like overkill. I'd invest that time in system design prep instead. That's where senior candidates get separated.

infra_ines (Primly starter)

The 'explain before you type' thing is everywhere at European companies. Very different from the US style where some interviewers are fine with you just grinding out code silently.