Priceline.com Interview Questions
& Process

This interview was a mess, disorganized and poorly managed. I'd avoid working for Priceline. The recruiter was at least 5 minutes late for our 20-minute scheduled chat, saying she was held up in another meeting, which is a major red flag. Usually, you'd excuse yourself from a previous meeting for a scheduled interview. The interview was supposed to have me, the recruiter, and a third person, possibly from the ML team. I emailed to check if anyone was showing up, and the technical person responded that their babysitter canceled, so they couldn't make it. That's a disrespectful excuse. It was also weird that the technical person was emailing from a personal Gmail, which might be an IT policy violation. Once we finally got online, the recruiter spent 10 minutes asking things already covered in my application, like my sponsorship needs. While it could be a one-off or just that person, it reflects the company culture, especially since these are supposed to be trained professionals. It seems like a top-down issue. I wouldn't recommend Priceline.

This is hands down the worst interview process I've experienced. I made it through numerous rounds of interviews over three months to be told I was the final candidate they wanted to move forward with. I completed the work sample (written so well they could have probably used it), and heard nothing. I followed up for weeks in a row waiting for the official offer to come through only to be told, now over 4 weeks since submitting my writing exercise, that they were reevaluating the role responsibilities and compensation, and they'd get back to me in the following WEEKS. I was no longer interested at this point, but incredibly disappointed by the amount of time, prep, and actual work I did to get the job and the complete lack of respect and communication. Huge red flags.

It was a 3 to 4 round process. The first round was a Recruiter call where they asked some technical questions. They asked about ConcurrentHashMap vs Map, thread safety, Set vs List use cases, and time complexity of data structures. They also asked about designing a system like Priceline. The second round was with a Principal Software Engineer and was more of a coding problem. It was done in CoderPad with a pre-written Java project. Some unit tests were failing and taking a long time. I had to look at the unit tests, classes, and methods to find the issues and improve them. It turned out the registration class's hashCode method was overridden with bad code, returning the hashCode of a static string. I also had to discuss other problems in the code, talk about my projects, and mention things from my resume.

The company was quick to move between interview stages. There were 4 interviews in total: HR, hiring manager, director, and senior director. It usually took 1-3 days for HR to let me know about the next steps after an interview. The entire process took about 1.5 months because of the holidays, vacation time, and scheduling difficulties. All the interviewers were approachable and preferred a natural conversation over sticking to a script. They asked standard behavioral questions that are best answered using the STAR method.