Booking.com uses a coding challenge from HackerRank for many software engineering candidates after resume screening and before live technical interviews. The test varies by role and hiring cycle. One recent software engineering candidate received four test questions covering arrays and strings. Booking.com's public test instructions confirm that candidates receive an invitation after resume review.

Use your invitation as the source of truth for the test's time limit, deadline, allowed languages, and monitoring rules.

When to Expect the OA for Your Role

For graduate and general software engineering roles, the OA is often the next step after resume screening. The OA may arrive immediately after resume screening or after a recruiter conversation. Experienced, specialist, or product candidates may speak with a recruiter or hiring manager before any technical exercise.

Check the assessment environment as soon as possible. Booking.com's HackerRank environment does not allow you to copy code from the internet. Use only your own knowledge and HackerRank's built-in tools.

Does Your Online Assessment Matter?

The OA is a screening step. One recent candidate was told that their submitted score was not high enough to advance. Booking.com does not publish a cutoff score. A platform score does not guarantee an offer. The score is one part of Booking.com's candidate evaluation.

Compiled List of Booking.com OA Question Types

These problems cover arrays, strings, heaps, sliding windows, stacks, intervals, and trees.

1. Reward Top K Students — weighted keyword matching and top-k ranking.
2. Sliding Window Maximum — deque-based sliding-window tracking.
3. Delete Duplicate Folders in System — tree serialization and duplicate detection.
4. Valid Parentheses — stack state and invalid-order detection.
5. Maximum Subarray — linear dynamic programming.
6. Merge Intervals — sorting and merging ranges.
7. Top K Frequent Elements — frequency maps and heap selection.
8. Number of Islands — grid traversal and visited-state tracking.
9. K Closest Points to Origin — sorting and selection.
10. LRU Cache — hash-map and linked-list coordination.

Booking.com Interview Questions

Recently asked in real interviews

These questions were asked recently in real Booking.com interviews. Practice these and 4,000+ other questions from 1,000+ companies on Lodely.

Valid Parentheses

algorithmscoding Easy

Find the maximum subarray sum.

algorithmscoding Medium

Design a metrics and logging service.

system-designtechnical Medium

Suppose you're a Booking.com PM. How would you investigate if a sales manager reports that the app is returning a 404 error?

technical Easy

Develop a system for dynamic pricing.

Product Strategy Easy

Explore All Questions

Free to get started

How to Prepare and Pass the Booking.com Online Assessment

Use a two-week plan. In week 1, review arrays, strings, heaps, stacks, and intervals. In week 2, complete three timed sets of four problems, then review every missed edge case. Practice parsing input, testing empty collections, and explaining time and space complexity before you submit.

Do one full mock in the language you're going to use on test day. Use Lodely to add Booking.com interview questions to your timed practice and prepare for the live interview format.

Booking.com Interview Question Breakdown

Reward Top K Students

Type: String processing, scoring, and ranking. Prompt: Turn positive and negative keyword matches into a score for each student, then return the top IDs. The Trick: Ties need a stable ordering rule, and repeated words can complicate rushed implementations. What It Tests: Parsing, deterministic ordering, and clean use of maps and heaps.

Sliding Window Maximum

Type: Array and monotonic deque. Prompt: Find the largest value as a fixed-width window moves through a sequence. The Trick: Recomputing every window is too slow, and stale indices must leave the deque. What It Tests: Data-structure choice, index tracking, and linear-time reasoning.

What Comes After the Online Assessment

If you advance, you will coordinate next steps with the recruiter before completing role-specific technical interviews. For a software engineering role, the next stages may include live coding interviews, system design or architecture discussions, and a behavioral interview. The exact process varies by level. Use your OA review to prepare for those rounds. Be ready to explain tradeoffs, test cases, and production considerations aloud.

Conclusion

Prioritize arrays, strings, ranking, and stateful data structures, then rehearse a four-question set under the time limit. Continue using Lodely's company question set to prepare for the next interview stage.