Skyscanner, the travel search company founded in Edinburgh, compares flights, hotels and car hire for travellers worldwide and has been owned by Trip.com Group, then called Ctrip, since a 2016 deal that valued it at about £1.4 billion; it continues to run independently. Candidates describe a loop built from a pair coding session, a deep dive into a project of their own, system design on travel problems and a values-focused culture interview. This page covers what Skyscanner builds and who it hires, the process candidates commonly report, the technical depth the teams care about, representative problem types, what interviewers score, and a three-week prep plan.
What Skyscanner builds and who it hires
Skyscanner's job posts describe a polyglot setup that is mostly Java microservices and Python batch jobs on AWS, with Kubernetes, Kinesis, Spark, Airflow and gRPC; a 2022 graduate posting said the company was entirely on AWS, using Kubernetes with Istio to host hundreds of services across several regions. Teams cover flight and hotel search, pricing and partner integrations, personalisation, data platforms and the mobile apps, which postings list in Kotlin, Swift and Jetpack Compose. Skyscanner also maintains Backpack, its open-source design system for web, iOS, Android and React Native, released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
- Backend engineers: search, pricing and partner services, mostly in Java.
- Data and distributed-systems engineers: Python, Spark and Airflow pipelines and streaming.
- Mobile and web engineers: the apps and site, built on the Backpack design system.
- Machine learning engineers: ranking, personalisation and MLOps.
What the process tends to look like
| Stage | What happens | How to prepare |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter call | Role, level, location and timeline | Know which part of travel search the team owns |
| Coding pair | About an hour of collaborative coding; candidates say problems are tied to Skyscanner use cases, and one mentions a graph-type question | Medium problems solved while talking with your pair |
| Technical deep dive | A walkthrough of a project you choose, which candidates describe as close to a system design round about your own work | One project you can defend at every layer |
| System design | A travel-shaped design such as a price alert or booking system; one candidate describes being given skeleton code | Caching, partner APIs and data freshness |
| Culture interview | Past situations mapped to Skyscanner's values; candidates describe it as thorough | One story per value |
Processes differ by team, level and office and change over time, so treat this as the common shape candidates report and confirm the specifics with your recruiter.
Travel search, data freshness and pairing
Search is fan-out. A flight search asks many airlines and travel agents for prices, so design answers revolve around fanning out requests, timeouts, partial results, caching quotes, and deciding how stale a cached price may be before it misleads someone. Explain how you would show results quickly and refresh them as better data arrives.
Pairing well. The coding pair rewards collaboration: clarify the problem, agree an approach, write readable code and test it together. Graph problems, such as routes with connections, fit the domain. Our guide to pair programming interviews covers the format.
Your own project. The deep dive is about a system you chose, so pick one where you made real decisions. Expect questions on scale, data models, failures you hit and what you would change.
Early careers. For graduates, Skyscanner's early-careers page describes a video interview and, for engineers, a coding test, followed in the UK, Barcelona and Singapore by a Discovery Day where you work through a realistic problem on a whiteboard and explain your thinking.
Representative problem types
These are the kinds of problems candidates describe, not a leaked question list. Practice the category, not the exact question.
- Find routes between two airports with at most k connections.
- Merge and rank price quotes from many partners that respond at different times.
- Design a price alert service that notifies travellers when a fare drops.
- Design a booking flow that hands off to a partner and tracks the result.
- Cache search results and decide when a cached price is too old.
- Deduplicate the same flight offered by several partners.
- Medium graph, heap and hash map problems solved in a pair.
What interviewers score
- Working code: a solution that runs, handles edge cases and is readable by the next engineer.
- Practical judgment: the trade-offs you name and the simplest design that meets the requirement.
- Product sense: understanding who the user is and what failure looks like for them.
- Ownership: examples where you shipped, measured and fixed things yourself.
The behavioral side
Technical rounds decide most outcomes, but every Skyscanner loop also asks about how you work. Prepare a short story for each of these, with a result and what you learned:
- Something you shipped end to end. Cover the user problem, your decisions, what you measured and what you would change.
- A disagreement with a teammate. Show how you made the decision on evidence and kept the relationship.
- Why this company? Connect its product and engineering problems to the work you want to do next.
Structures and sample answers for the common questions are in our software engineer behavioral answers guide.
A three-week prep plan
- Week 1: pair coding: six medium problems, half of them graph problems, solved aloud with a friend acting as your pair, agreeing an approach before writing code.
- Week 2: travel design: a price alert service and a multi-partner search with caching and timeouts, each in under an hour, plus our hotel booking system design walkthrough for booking flows.
- Week 3: deep dive and culture: choose one project and rehearse it from requirements to failures, read Skyscanner's values and prepare a story for each, and do two mock interviews.
For practice lists, use LeetCode company-tagged questions; compare travel loops at Booking.com and Expedia and the European style of Spotify; and for design rounds, read system design building blocks.
Where CoPilot Interview fits
Most of a Skyscanner loop is spoken: you explain an approach, defend a trade-off and talk through your past work. CoPilot Interview is an AI interview assistant whose free AI mock interview builds technical and behavioral questions from your résumé and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of ten, so you can rehearse the explanation as well as the code. The free plan gives 15 minutes a day of live help in sessions of up to 15 minutes, with AI mock interviews included. Online assessments and many coding rounds forbid outside help, so practice beforehand and follow your employer's rules on the day.
Disclosure: CoPilot Interview is our product, so weigh what we say about it accordingly.
Frequently asked questions
What programming language should I use in a Skyscanner interview?
Java is the most common backend language and Python dominates data work, but candidates generally report a free choice for the coding pair. Mobile roles use Kotlin or Swift.
Does Skyscanner send an online assessment?
For early-careers engineers, Skyscanner's own page describes a coding test after a video interview. Experienced candidates more often report going straight from the recruiter call to the coding pair. Confirm with your recruiter.
What is a Skyscanner Discovery Day?
It is the final stage for early-careers candidates in the UK, Barcelona and Singapore, according to Skyscanner's careers site. You get a realistic problem of the kind Skyscanner staff face and work through it on a whiteboard with an interviewer, who looks at how you explain your thinking as well as the answer.
How should I prepare for Skyscanner coding questions?
Practice practical problems under time limits, build small features against an API in your interview language, and prepare one system design in Skyscanner's domain. Explain every solution out loud, because follow-up questions about trade-offs matter as much as the first answer.
Can I use AI tools in a Skyscanner interview?
Only if the instructions you receive say so. Online assessments and live coding rounds generally forbid outside help, and some companies now state their AI policy in the invitation. Use AI to practice beforehand, and follow your employer's rules.
Practice this interview before the real one
The AI mock interview builds questions from your resume and the job description, reads them aloud and scores each spoken answer out of 10. Included on the free plan.
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