Horrible engineering culture - Senior Software Engineer KAYAK Employee Review

1.0
20 Nov 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Good work life balance

Cons

- No drive / boldness to innovate old monolite architecture - Making money is more important than user experience - Build + start time of frontend solution takes about 30 minutes - Managed by american employees, european knowledge gets discarded - No clear vision on how product should define itself within the next years - Tech teams don't work together, everyones is working for themselfes. They even compete silently against each other introducing different tech stacks. - Releasing fast instead of quality.

Explore other reviews about KAYAK

5.0
27 Jan 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great people and interesting industry to be in

Cons

Sometimes too focused on the data and not the human experience.

4.0
24 Nov 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great benefits: Healthcare had great coverage and affordable monthly payments. I also really appreciated the work-from-wherever policy as well as all the office snacks. Fantastic people: I genuinely loved the people I worked with—they made me feel like I belonged and was appreciated. My manager worked to build me up, something that can't be said for a lot of places. Travel perks: The ability to travel for work made this experience incredibly rewarding.

Cons

Slow mobility: Trying to get promoted felt like a moving goalpost—the expectations changed every six months and made it nearly impossible to get to the next step. Even then, the business was stingy about who gets promoted, which was incredibly discouraging after years of trying to prove myself.

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