The modern traveller. Mobile first and environmentally conscious, with a more insatiable appetite for adventure than any generation before them. Our focus is now on ensuring a seamless experience, for an audience that's increasingly wanting to explore the planet, whilst also protecting it.
Let's change how the world travels
If you want to embrace software at scale in an environment that still feels small enough for everyone to make an impact, read on. Here’s everything you need to know about life at Skyscanner and how to prepare for your interview.
The story so far
We're proud to be the world's most trusted travel site.
And we're not just saying that - our customers did. Since we burst onto the scene in 2003 to change the way everyone travelled, we've moved on to offering car hire and hotels too. All forming part of our move toward providing a complete travel experience. With 100 million monthly users, we know that we have the power to change travel - for good.*
* Based on data from Trustpilot traveller reviews for Skyscanner.net and global domains for our competitors
Our mission
To lead the global transformation to modern and sustainable travel.
Our brand
We’ve a bold look to match our outlook. Celebrating everything we love about travel, it marks a commitment to our mission and presents our ambition to the world. But what does it mean for our Engineers? Well, it means opportunity. As we grow, they'll enjoy even more scale. And, the more scale they have, the more exciting the opportunities they'll get.
Our culture
We draw a lot of parallels between our team members and our customers. Probably because they're often the same people. It helps to be united by a love of travel, keeping us committed to doing the right thing for people and the planet. Listening, supporting and questioning to make sure we do. When it comes to relationships with our people and employees, we play the long game. Looking to build strong ones. Not easy ones. We believe that great people make great products. So, we spend time and money on developing the individuals that make what we do possible.
1,000+ employees
50 nationalities
Principal Engineer Nicky Wrightson is a prime example of how exciting careers can be here, and how the individual contributor route could work for you.
Wanting to lead and have impact through her technical ability, Nicky opted for our Principal Engineer role, rather than a traditional people management path. She saw it as an opportunity to take all she had learned and move forward, without completely leaving code behind. She would become an enabler. Someone who influenced her team, the wider programme and the global tech community. Through hard work that centred around providing support for her colleagues.
Now she’s working tribe-wide over several squads, ensuring the whole operation runs smoothly.
Read Nicky's full story and dive deep into the origin and place of Principal Engineers.
How we move
We iterate, we improve, we measure and, where necessary, we change course. It's all part of being Agile. When it comes to Engineering at Skyscanner, our teams strive to deliver an unmatched traveller experience. To help them do this, they're guided each day by our Engineering Principles.
We have a clear definition of success for every piece of work.
We ship multiple times a day and deliver customer value week in, week out.
We use design reviews to validate every significant change.
We deliver our products using our defined technology standards.
We peer review every change.
We cover all changes with automated tests, responsibly.
Our definitions of done include being live in production... responsibly.
You build it, you run it.
We own and are responsible for the data we produce.
Find out more about how these principles work for us.
Basically a mini startup
Squad
Primary home (like a scrum team)
One long-term mission.
Product squads have all the skills/tools needed to design, develop, test & release to production.
Self-organising.
Agile, lean, MVP, experimentation. Real-time dashboard monitoring against OKRs.
Service ownership
Generally sit together.
Squad lead focuses on HOW. Including quality, throughput, and ongoing improvement.
Product Owner focuses on WHAT. Defines backlog, prioritises feature work.
Example: Hotels Web Front End Squad
Mission: To help users to find their ideal hotel and book it as easily as possible across mobile, tablet and desktop web.
Incubators for the mini startups
Tribe
Squads who work best together
Squads within tribe general sit in the same area.
100 people per tribe.
Regular informal get-togethers to share what working on, demos etc.
Formal governance to ensure alignment.
Tribe lead focuses on HOW. Including quality, throughput, and ongoing improvement.
Tribe project manager provides agile coaching to squads and responsible for delivery of complex, multi-squad, multi-tribe projects.
Example: The Hotels Tribe includes Hotels, Partner Engineering, Web Front End, Web Back End and Data squads.
Agile coaching and supporting continuous improvement
- Each squad has access to an Agile coach.
- Mechanisms such as Health Checks, Retrospectives and TOC enable squad and tribe level improvement.
- Pulse surveys enable feedback on where company improvements and support are needed.
- Dependency reviews or “scrum of scrums” can be called upon whenever necessary.
People who do similar work (design, testing etc).
Chapter
Secondary home, for line management
Meet regularly to discuss expertise and challenges.
Chapter lead Is line manager for Chapter members.
Chapter lead is responsible for developing people & adopting best in-tribe practices but remains part of squad & does day-to-day work.
Example: Within a tribe there will be design, engineering, test engineering, PDO and other chapters.
Communities of interest
Guild
A group of people from across the organisation who want to share knowledge, tools, code & select and trial companywide practices. Each has a Guild Co-ordinator. Some examples are the web engineering guild, the data & machine learning guild, and the agile coaching guild.