Booking.com Data Science Interview Questions
There are 28 Million+ listings to stay on Booking.com.
Booking.com is the travel E-Commerce part of Booking Holdings. They have over 140,000+ destinations in 230 countries all over the world. They also have over 1.5 Million+ nights reserved every day on their platform. From a data science perspective, this translates into over 300 TB of data. A robust data engineering infrastructure coupled with huge amounts of data makes Booking.com one of the best places for a Data Scientist to build their career.
Interview Process
The interview process starts with MCQ based test on machine learning and statistics questions.That is followed by the HR phone interview. Once you clear both of those, there is a technical phone interview with data scientists. This is based around your projects and also includes a case study discussion. Finally there is an onsite interview which consists of technical interviews, behavioural interview and hiring manager interview.
Important Reading
- Data Streaming Ecosystem: Booking.com Platform
- Productionizing of Behavioral Features: ML with Apache Spark
- Druid: Interactive Analytics at (big) Scale
Data Science Related Interview Questions
- What is the difference between L1 and L2 regularization?
- What is gradient decent?
- Why did you use Random Forests instead of Clustering on a particular problem?(case study)
- How to deal with new hotels that do not have an official rating?
- If the training error and the testing error are both high, as the number of data points increase, what measures will you take to fix the model?
- How would you optimize the advertising that directs people to your site? How do you evaluate how much to spend on each channel?
- What do you do to make sure your model is not over fitting?
- Given a business case as such, how would you handle this with a Machine Learning solution?
- How did you validate your model?
- What are the parameters of decision trees and random forests, and how would you choose them?
Reflecting on the Questions
Booking.com is headquartered in Amsterdam but has offices all over the globe. Data dictates the spending and drives efficiency in their business. It is a critical component of their product. The questions are about deep data science fundamentals and also about the different situations within their business where they deploy data science. A good knowledge of Data Science fundamentals coupled with know how about their business can surely land you a job with one of the world’s largest booking sites!
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The sole motivation of this blog article is to learn about Booking.com and its technologies helping people to get into it. All data is sourced from online public sources. I aim to make this a living document, so any updates and suggested changes can always be included. Please provide relevant feedback.
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