MakeMyTrip is India's largest online travel agency (OTA), operating the MakeMyTrip and Goibibo brands and serving over 50 million travellers annually. Listed on NASDAQ, MakeMyTrip's engineering teams in Gurugram and Bengaluru build flight booking, hotel search, holiday packages, and bus and train booking across web and mobile platforms. The company's core technical challenges are real-time inventory, dynamic pricing, and GDS (Global Distribution System) integration, making it a distinctive employer for engineers interested in travel tech at scale.
MakeMyTrip Engineering Stack and Teams
MakeMyTrip's engineering is organised around three core product surfaces. Flights: The flight booking platform integrates with GDS providers (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) to aggregate real-time airline seat inventory and fares. The tech stack is Java Spring Boot for the booking APIs (which handle 1M+ fare queries per day), Apache Kafka for real-time price-change events, and Redis for caching the most-searched fare combinations. Python is used for the pricing analytics pipeline that tracks competitor pricing and adjusts MMT's markup strategy. Hotels: The hotel search and booking platform aggregates inventory from direct hotel connections (via channel manager APIs), OTA partners (Booking.com, Expedia), and the Goibibo hotel inventory. PostgreSQL stores hotel metadata and contracts; Elasticsearch powers the hotel search (filter by star rating, location, amenities). The ML team builds ranking models to personalise hotel results for each user. Holidays and Packages: A more complex product involving itinerary building, supplier coordination, and dynamic packaging. Python and Java microservices handle the complex pricing logic for multi-component packages (flight + hotel + tours). The MMT platform also operates a bus booking marketplace via Redbus (a subsidiary) and a trains booking integration with IRCTC.
MakeMyTrip Interview Process 2026
MMT's interview process typically runs 4 rounds. Round 1 (Online Assessment): 75-90 minutes on HackerRank. Two coding problems at LeetCode easy-to-medium level in Java or Python, plus 1-2 travel tech domain MCQs (for example: 'what is the best data structure to cache 10,000 most-searched flight routes with TTL expiry?'). Round 2 (Technical Interview 1 — DSA): 60 minutes. Algorithmic problems typical of travel tech: shortest path algorithms (Dijkstra for flight route optimisation), interval problems (flight schedule overlap, hotel check-in/out date validation), string manipulation (airline PNR parsing), and heap-based problems (top-K cheapest flights in a time window). Round 3 (System Design): 60-75 minutes. Common questions: 'Design the MakeMyTrip flight search and fare caching system for 1 million daily searches', 'Design a hotel inventory aggregation service that syncs availability from 50 different hotel APIs', or 'Design the holiday package builder with real-time pricing'. Candidates are evaluated on GDS integration patterns, caching strategy for volatile pricing data, and handling the eventual consistency problem in travel inventory. Round 4 (HR or Bar Raiser): Behavioural questions using the STAR format. MMT values adaptability (OTA business has high seasonality), data-driven decision making, and customer obsession.
Travel Tech Domain: GDS and Pricing
Understanding the travel technology domain is a significant differentiator in MakeMyTrip interviews. Global Distribution Systems (GDS): Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport are the three major GDS providers that aggregate airline seat inventory. When you search for a flight on MMT, MMT queries the GDS in real time, parses the fare response (EDIFACT or IATA NDC format for modern APIs), and displays the cheapest valid combinations. Understanding the distinction between published fares (available to all OTAs via GDS) and private fares (negotiated directly with airlines) is useful for pricing discussions. Dynamic Pricing: Airfare prices change frequently, sometimes minute by minute. MMT's pricing strategy involves: the base fare from the airline (via GDS), MMT's own markup (percentage or fixed), convenience fees, and discount coupons (funded by MMT or the airline). The challenge is that caching helps with query speed but cached fares may have expired by the time the user tries to book, requiring a fare validation step before ticketing. Hotel Inventory Aggregation: Unlike flights (dominated by a few GDS providers), hotel inventory is fragmented across thousands of direct hotel connections, channel managers (SiteMinder, Cloudbeds), and wholesale aggregators. The challenge is normalising heterogeneous inventory data (different date formats, currency, room type naming conventions) into MMT's unified hotel model.
MakeMyTrip interviews test Java, system design, and travel tech domain knowledge. Use HireStepX to practise with AI voice coaching tailored to MakeMyTrip's interview format.
Practice freeMakeMyTrip Salary and Career
MakeMyTrip is NASDAQ-listed, giving engineers RSU exposure to public market liquidity. 2026 salary benchmarks: Junior SWE (0-2 years): Rs 15-28 LPA total comp. Mid-level SWE (2-5 years): Rs 28-50 LPA. Senior SWE (5+ years): Rs 48-80 LPA. Principal/Staff Engineer: Rs 75-120 LPA. Data Scientist (3-5 years): Rs 25-50 LPA. Senior Data Scientist: Rs 45-80 LPA. RSUs vest over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. The Gurugram HQ (near Cyber Hub) and Bengaluru offices are the engineering centres. MakeMyTrip's engineering culture is product-driven: engineers have high visibility into business metrics (conversion rates, basket sizes, repeat booking rates) and participate in product decisions. The high seasonality of the travel business (peak: summer holidays, Diwali, Christmas-New Year) creates interesting scaling challenges that engineers find technically engaging.
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