2025–2026 Agoda Staff Backend OA: What Recent Reports Actually Show

Coverage: Staff Software Engineer, Staff Backend, and closely related Senior Backend roles; primarily Bangkok and India; reports from 2025–2026, with one older detailed OA included only as a concrete example.

The short version

The best-matched recent reports point to a mixed assessment, not a reliably pure-DSA test.

1. HackerRank is the recurring platform. Two closely matched reports described a 90-minute assessment.
2. The most repeated format is two questions. One is a LeetCode-style DSA problem; the other is an HTTP or REST API implementation task.
3. The API portion appears to require working code. Candidates described calling a provided endpoint, parsing the response, and consolidating or transforming the returned data.
4. Difficulty varies. The DSA question was described as medium, medium–hard, or hard depending on the candidate and requisition.
5. Pure-DSA reports can still be accurate. Agoda appears to use different templates by team and role. Some candidates also use “HackerRank round” to describe the later live-coding interview rather than the initial OA.

Recent OA reports

OA 01: Staff Software Engineer

Report date: November 2025 · Platform: HackerRank · Duration: 90 minutes

1. One DSA question.
2. One REST API question.

The candidate attached screenshots but did not describe the complete prompts in the written report.

OA 02: Backend Staff/SSE

Report date: October 2025 · Role family: Backend Staff/Senior

1. A medium–hard LeetCode-style problem involving arrays and sorting.
2. An API-based business-logic task: call a provided endpoint and consolidate the returned data.

This is the clearest recent firsthand description of the “real-world API” portion.

OA 03: Senior Backend Engineer

Role: Senior Software Engineer, Backend · Experience: 8+ years

1. A medium graph/tree problem.
2. A basic HTTP request/response implementation problem.

The candidate then had a separate live-coding round containing two DSA problems. That separation likely explains why some discussions describe the process as pure DSA.

A fully disclosed older OA example

One older Senior Software Engineer report preserved three complete task shapes. It should be treated as historical context, not a promise that the same questions still appear.

1. Process airline seat requests in SQL

Two tables describe the current seats and a sequence of reservation or purchase requests. Requests must be processed in request-ID order. A free seat may be reserved or purchased, while a reserved seat may be purchased only by the person who reserved it. The required output is the final seat table after every valid request is applied.

2. Combine a REST API response with an exchange-rate table

Call a provided market-purchase endpoint and parse a product price and purchase timestamp from its JSON response. Then query a MySQL table containing timestamped exchange-rate changes, select the latest rate effective at the purchase time, and output the converted price.

3. Aggregate customer data from a CSV file

Read customer records from a CSV and output:

1. Total customer count.
2. Customer counts grouped by city.
3. Customer counts grouped by country.
4. The country with the largest total number of signed contracts.
5. The number of unique cities represented.

The prompt also specified alphabetical ordering and a case-sensitive tie-breaking rule.

Questions reported in later Staff coding rounds

These appeared in coding interviews and should not automatically be treated as OA questions:

1. Find pairs whose absolute difference equals K.
2. Count palindromic substrings.
3. A binary-search problem resembling Koko Eating Bananas.
4. Find nearest-smaller elements using a monotonic stack.
5. Rank every value in an array of priorities, with larger values receiving higher ranks.
6. Variations of Stock Buy/Sell and Jump Game.