KAYAK Interview Questions
& Process

The process started off great and then just got progressively worse, to the point where I'm not even interested in the company anymore. On the plus side, the people I met were smart, nice, and really seemed into the business, and the role itself sounded interesting. But, the whole thing took forever, like six stages over more than two months, even though they initially said three to four stages. They kept adding more interviews at each step without really explaining why. Also, a big change happened where they switched from being "remote-first" to requiring people to come into the London office three days a week. They didn't tell me this until super late in the process, and it's still not updated on their careers site. This was a huge shift from their previous remote-first vibe. They waited to tell me this after I'd already spent two weeks on a big task. They knew it was messed up, and the hiring manager did call to apologize, which I appreciated. The most annoying part, though, is that the hiring manager and everyone else I spoke to were in different global offices, but I'd still have to commute two hours each way just to sit in a London office with no one from my team there and then dial into global calls? It just doesn't make sense! The final feedback after all that time was super generic and unhelpful, especially considering how much time I put in. Luckily, I have another offer now and had already decided against this role before the generic rejection, but they really could have handled it way better and not made me feel like I wasted two months.

I got a take-home assignment from the recruiter that I needed to finish within 5 business days. No intro call or anything. After I finished the assignment, the recruiter went silent and I never heard back about any updates. It feels like they aren't moving forward with the hiring. The assignments felt like they were sent automatically.

The process started with a phone screening, then there were 4 more interviews. I interviewed with the hiring manager, a team lead from my potential team, a team lead from another team, and the global lead. They were all very responsive and scheduled the interviews within a few weeks. A big focus for all of them was discussing the company culture to see if I would be a good fit, which is really important at KAYAK.

So, I had this take-home coding challenge, a 'Robot' thing, and two recursive methods, one printing 1 to 5, the other counting 5 down to 1. I had a week for it. If they liked it, I then chatted with the hiring manager about behaviors, basic OOP, and Java 8 stuff. The next interview was about 3 hours long, with the hiring manager again for OOP and Java 8 details for an hour, then a 30-min codepan with Java 8, Collections, Hashset, Equals, Hashcode, and Generics. After that, I spent an hour with the team lead, mostly behavioral, plus a quick 15-min codepan with an easy LeetCode problem. I was supposed to meet the architect, but then I got ghosted for a week and finally told they went with someone else. Super unprofessional, but they did give me a glimpse into how they work.