Booking.com Software Engineer I interview questions

HR Phone screening, 15 minutes. Discussion of what I have done. 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 ones. General ones. Discussion of pros and cons, time complexity. After this I was invited to Amsterdam for onsite interview. Technical/Algorithmic, 1 hour: Interview with panel of two persons. Algorithmic question, first you solve then pros and cons of the approach. Time complexity, scaling. Seems they trying to cover different ares of programming/computing around this question. System Design/business case implementation, 1 hour : This is more how will be taking a real like feature and implementing it for booking.com. Discussion around the impact of the feature, how will you measure success. How will you implement it. Little open ended. Behavioural ( I think) , 1 hour : With team lead. This round is super vague. But I assume the intention is measure the (cultural)fit. More like how you tackled situation. Discussion about org structure of Booking.com. I was asked to leave, and after a week got mail saying that they wont be extending the offer. This below would be personal observations from a one who didn't get the offer. May be there is some bias here. Make your own judgement. Office and work place looks decent. Work looks fuzzy, I think mostly implementing business features or modifying features. Apparently these people are recruiting heavily because of the growth. So there is a lot of interviews going on. Seems like there is very low ration of going onsite from interview to getting the offer. Seems like a bad filter. What ever the case thats Booking.com decision if they want to spend money and time its their choice. But if I have to spend half an week spending time to travel and interview, I will think twice. Yes, you get to see Amsterdam, but I have seen it twice. Also the third interview(behavioural) one mostly looks useless. I have been part of the interview which used to do that, but we have to stop because there is no uniform way of accessing this. At the end it simply turns out to be whim of the person who is taking it.

About a week after I sent my resume and cover letter, there was a phone screen, which lasted about 20 minutes. I was interviewed by phone in the next day, for about 1 hour, in which I had to do a programming exercise in any language of my choice. After about a week, they called again saying they wanted me to visit their office in Amsterdam for another interview. They paid the entire trip (planes and hotel) from my country, Brazil, to Amsterdam. The interview had a few hard questions, but it was mostly fun. All the interviewers were very friendly. A couple of days after my return to Brazil, they called me with the offer.