TravelPerk (Perk) interview, decoded.

Perk doesn't publish its engineering loop, and the candidate accounts we could open are few. The shape below combines what the job ads say about the coding interview with one Barcelona candidate's account from July 2026. Treat the order and number of rounds as approximate and ask your recruiter for the plan on the first call.

Perk's ads name its values and describe the engineer it wants in detail, and both come through in the interview.

• Being an owner: taking a feature from the customer's problem through design, code and deployment to its measured impact
• A 7-star experience for the customer, one of the values the ads name
• Working as one team, across product, design and operations
• Pragmatism and simplicity: the ads measure engineering by how reliable and simple the systems are
• Using AI well in daily work, from writing and reviewing code to agentic coding

No candidate account we could open lists Perk's questions. What follows is built from what its ads say it looks for, so what you practise matches what it screens for.

Yes, and Perk expects you to. Its 2026 engineering ads say candidates should use AI tools in the coding interviews, that the bar is understanding your code and owning what you produce, and that this reflects how its engineers work every day, with agentic coding and AI review on every pull request. The round rewards judgement about the tool, and pasting in output you can't explain falls short of that bar.

• Decide the approach before you prompt: Say how you will solve the problem and why, then ask the assistant for the parts you have already designed. The interviewer should hear your plan first and see the tool carry it out.
• Read everything the assistant writes: Go through the generated code out loud, name what each part does and fix what is wrong. Expect questions like "why this data structure?" about lines you did not type.
• Prove it works: Ask for tests or write them, run them and add the edge cases the assistant missed. Owning what you produce includes knowing it is correct.
• Practise with the tool you will use: Before the interview, solve a few problems of the kind you expect with an AI assistant, timing yourself and explaining each step aloud as if someone were listening.

Ask your recruiter which tools are allowed and whether you share your screen with your own editor. The ads don't say.

The Spain range is the one Levels.fyi gives for TravelPerk software engineers, read on 26 September 2026; the median package it shows is an L4 engineer in Barcelona with ten years of experience, paid in base salary with no stock. Perk's European ads carry no pay range. The Boston ads give base salary ranges and say pay combines salary and stock options. Calibrd benchmarks the offer against your level and location in the report.

1. Practise coding with an AI assistant before the interview, explaining your plan first and every generated line after.
2. Bring two or three stories where you owned a feature from the customer problem to its measured impact. That is the engineer every Perk ad describes.
3. For senior and staff roles, prepare to walk through a design document you wrote: the problem, the options and why you chose one.
4. Search for the company under both names. Most reviews and threads still say TravelPerk.
5. If you need a visa, raise it on the first call. The ads promise relocation help only for certain roles.
6. Ask for the timeline at each stage and follow up once if it passes. One recent Barcelona candidate heard nothing for weeks.
7. Plan for three days a week in the office. Perk brought staff back three days a week in 2023, despite a letter of disagreement from its engineers, and the 2026 ads keep the rule.

This guide covers Perk's engineering hiring. What Perk says about its coding interview, stack, office days and relocation comes from its own job ads; candidate accounts are few, and we say where one account is all there is. For management and leadership roles the loop is similar but the bar shifts to people, delivery and strategy, so pair it with the leadership interview prep hub. The bar for your exact role comes from the role-by-role guides, and the prep that actually transfers is spoken, so run a mock interview before the real one.

• 01Perk, Senior Software Engineer, Barcelonathe AI tools line for coding interviews, the values, what a senior engineer owns, three days a week in person, and relocation for certain roles (posted 25 September 2026)
• 02Perk, Staff Software Engineer, FlightsFlights growing from one team to four since 2025, the domain's failure modes, roughly 80% backend on Python and AWS, and running your own services (posted 26 May 2026)
• 03Perk, Staff Software Engineer, Bostonthe $174,000 to $215,000 base salary range with stock options (posted 16 September 2026)
• 04Perk, Senior Software Engineer, Bostonthe $140K to $180K range with equity (posted 31 August 2026)
• 05Perk, TravelPerk rebrands to Perkthe new name, dual headquarters in Boston and London, and more than 1,800 employees across 12 offices (4 November 2025)
• 06Perk, $200m Series E and Yokoythe $2.7 billion valuation (January 2025)
• 07Sifted, TravelPerk U-turns on remote workthe return to the Barcelona office three days a week and the engineers' letter of disagreement (12 April 2023)
• 08PracHub, a software engineer interview at Perkone Barcelona candidate's account: a short HR call, several technical stages, and no feedback or answer for weeks (reported July 2026)
• 09Reddit, observations of the 2025 tech marketa candidate stopped at the HR or hiring manager stage at TravelPerk over visa sponsorship (15 April 2025)
• 10Levels.fyi, TravelPerk software engineer salariesthe €59.3K to €73.2K+ range across 76 submissions and the Barcelona median package (26 September 2026)

Interview processes change. This reflects widely-reported and sourced conditions as of 2026 — confirm specifics with your recruiter, and treat it as a map rather than a guarantee.