Skyscanner is the dominant European travel search engine — flights, hotels, car rentals across hundreds of partners. Owned by Trip.com Group. The interview emphasizes search aggregation, real-time pricing, and the unique challenges of integrating with diverse partner systems.
Process
Recruiter screen → 60-minute coding phone (DSA medium) → onsite virtual: 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 craft deep-dive, 1 behavioral. Cycle: 3–4 weeks.
What they actually ask
- Design a flight search aggregator with sub-second results from many partners. This is the signature Skyscanner question — fan out queries to partner APIs in parallel, set aggressive per-partner timeouts so one slow provider can’t stall the whole response, and cache fare results with short TTLs because prices go stale fast. Interviewers probe how you return partial results when a partner is late and how you rank across inconsistent partner data.
- Design price prediction for flight deals. Focus on the data pipeline: historical fare snapshots, route and seasonality features, and how you’d label what counts as a “good deal.” Expect questions on storing time-series price history cheaply and serving a prediction fast enough to show inline with search.
- Design a recommendation engine for travel suggestions. Talk through candidate generation from destinations and price signals, then ranking on user history and budget. They want to see you reason about cold-start users with no history and how you’d measure whether a suggestion actually drove a booking rather than just a click.
- Coding: medium DSA, often with caching or graph framing. Expect problems that map to familiar coding patterns applied to travel work — shortest-path or connection-graph traversals for multi-leg routes, and cache design like LRU. Practice explaining time and space trade-offs aloud, not just landing a working solution.
- Behavioral: customer focus, ownership, working in mature platform. Come with stories about owning a feature end to end and making a call with the traveler’s experience in mind. They probe how you operate inside a large, established codebase rather than a greenfield startup, so lean on collaboration and steady, incremental improvement.
Levels and comp (2026)
- SE II: £65K–£85K total (Edinburgh / London)
- Senior SE: £95K–£130K
- Staff: £135K–£175K
- Principal: £180K–£240K
UK comp scale; below FAANG-Europe. Strong work-life balance.
Prep priorities
- Be fluent in Python (legacy services) or Go (newer). Know one deeply: older services lean on Python while newer platform work is in Go, so be ready to read and write idiomatic code in whichever language the role targets.
- Understand travel data: GDS, ATPCO, fare construction. GDS systems like Amadeus and Sabre plus ATPCO fare rules govern how prices and availability flow in. You don’t need to be an expert, but knowing why fares are volatile and hard to cache signals real domain awareness.
- Brush up on caching and search aggregation patterns. Review cache invalidation, TTL choices, and scatter-gather fan-out with per-partner timeouts — these exact ideas recur in both the coding and system-design rounds.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Skyscanner remote-friendly?
Hybrid in Edinburgh (HQ), London, Glasgow, Barcelona. Some engineering roles fully remote within EU.
How does Skyscanner compare to Hopper or Booking.com?
Skyscanner is search-aggregator-focused. Hopper is mobile-first. Booking.com is broader OTA. Skyscanner comp is European-tier; below US peers.
What is the engineering culture?
UK / European engineering: collaborative, calm pace, strong work-life balance. Mature platform with stable team.
Similar company guides
Prepping for Skyscanner? Put it to work:
