I Joinned Skyscanner as Software Engineer

I wanted to share a bit about my experience over the past few months, including the hiring and onboarding processes here at Skyscanner.

HIRING PROCESS

My hiring process was very smooth and efficient. I was contacted by an internal recruiter via LinkedIn who informed me about a position at Skyscanner that matched my skill set and was likely to be of interest to me. The recruiter sent me more details about the role and invited me for a chat, and the recruiter was very polite and welcoming.

From the start, I could tell they are interested in helping you succeed in your job application. A call was scheduled on the following day, and during our first conversation, we discussed the position in more detail.

I also got more information about the company, culture, and expectations. They did a good job explaining how the hiring process works and asked me a few questions to understand more about my situation at the time.

At this stage, if you are happy to go ahead, the hiring process begins in earnest.

The process depends on the job you are applying for and may vary, but from an engineering perspective, the process is composed of three steps:

1. The first step was an online test, a super fun one where you get to build a small full-stack project. And only 48 hours after submitting it, I was contacted with the good news that I was moving forward to the next part of the hiring process and received useful feedback.
2. In the second step, I had two interviews — the first was a technical interview to test my depth of expertise, followed by a cultural interview that was super chill, to understand how I would fit in at Skyscanner.
3. In the third and final step, you are generally invited to into the office and do the last three interviews face-to-face. But due to COVID restrictions, this part of the hiring process was done remotely. The interviews are each one hour in length, and you have a few minutes in between, so you have a chance to refresh yourself or grab a drink before going to the next one. The first two interviews were technical ones in which you get to solve some challenging problems (system design style). The last one was a final cultural interview. It was interesting, and you need to be ready for those, but you can also see more about Skyscanner’s cultural values and ask any questions you might have.

The recruitment team did a great job contacting me before each round of interviews, explaining more about the process and the interviews/tests and providing resources that helped me prepare for the interviews.

I was interviewed by hugely talented people from a few of Skyscanner’s different offices around the world, such as Barcelona, Edinburgh and London.

I guess that’s just one of the many advantages of working for a global company.

I noticed that the culture here at Skyscanner was great and different from places I have worked in the past, and that made me feel more excited throughout the process.

FIRST WEEK

I was introduced to my new team (squad) and Tribe members during my first week at work. I also got assigned an ‘induction buddy’, which was exciting and very helpful. He is a senior engineer who was tasked with onboarding me during my first 30 days.

That means he was my first point of contact, or maybe more accurately, my best buddy for my first month. The person I could ask any questions I had.

I got assigned to my manager, then we had our first 1–2–1 (one to one) meeting, and I was introduced to my onboarding plan.

THE ONBOARDING PLAN

This plan is designed to help me during my first 90 days at the company, with a clear set of goals that I should achieve during my initial three months to pass my probation and be successful. It was essential to have some direction and understand how Skyscanner works to ensure I could successfully collaborate with other teams.

Along the way, I did have weekly meetings with my manager to discuss my goals, plan and progress, and he would use those meetings to provide me with some support and feedback, facilitating my journey.

My onboarding plan goals include:

• Training
• Collaboration with other squads
• Delivering some value to our travellers (read it as writing code)

WORKING AS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER

I joined a team responsible for helping travellers plan and choose where and when they want to travel, providing them with information about flights, hotels and car hire.

Tech-wise I was impressed and overwhelmed as we are a technology-first company, and we build scalable systems using the latest technologies and different programming languages across the product.

We build many excellent tools, and one of my favourite things is the development culture we have: “You build it, you run it”.

So all the engineers are responsible for the products they work on, which means we build, deploy, scale our applications and monitor them.

We work on a crazy scale serving our experience to millions of travellers every day, and that is great and exciting, but it does bring a set of unique challenges that we engineers love to solve.

We work on a sprint-based week with a lot of collaboration, and the engineers have a lot of freedom in deciding which projects they want to work on.

Besides that, in my second week, I did manage to get some work live that delivered value to our travellers, which was unique and exciting.

Every day we have some focused time allocated in our schedule, so you can be free of meetings and focus on writing code and finishing your tasks.

The culture here is excellent, the team is diverse, and people love to work here, and some members of my squad have been here for many years. Everyone seems happy to help and collaborate with you. The culture here reinforces that, and there are different types of recognition that you can get by helping other colleagues.

I’m happy to talk to anyone who is interested about my experience if anyone wants to hear more.

Join Skyscanner

From flights to hotels and car hire, Skyscanner works side-by-side with the biggest names in travel to bring over 100 million users all the options they need to plan and book their perfect trip.

We’re already a market leader and we’re just getting started. Next stop: Leading the global transformation to modern and sustainable travel.

Join us for the adventure of a lifetime. Together we can change how the world travels. https://www.skyscanner.net/jobs/current-jobs/