Preparing for an interview at Fora Travel requires a balanced approach that combines strong technical fundamentals with a clear understanding of product and user needs. The engineering team values practical problem-solving and clear communication over memorizing obscure algorithmic puzzles.

Technical Execution – You must demonstrate a solid grasp of core software engineering principles, including clean code design, efficient data structures, and robust API design. Be prepared to write clean, readable code and discuss the trade-offs of your approach, including time and space complexity.

Communication & Collaboration – Interviewers place a high premium on how you articulate your thoughts. You should be able to explain complex technical concepts simply, listen actively to feedback, and collaborate effectively with both engineering peers and cross-functional partners like product managers.

Architectural Thinking – For system and API design rounds, you need to show that you can design scalable, modular, and maintainable systems. Focus on defining clear boundaries, choosing the right databases and protocols, and addressing potential failure modes and bottlenecks.

Product & User Empathy – Fora Travel is a product-driven company. You should demonstrate a strong interest in the end-user experience, showing that you think about how your technical decisions impact the travel advisors using the platform daily.

The interview process at Fora Travel is designed to evaluate both your technical capabilities and your alignment with the company's collaborative culture. It progresses from initial screenings to deeper technical assessments, culminating in a comprehensive virtual onsite and team-fit discussions. The team aims to keep the process transparent and conversational, focusing on practical skills rather than academic puzzles.

The journey begins with a standard recruiter screening to discuss your background and expectations, followed by a technical screen that covers core coding and web fundamentals. If you advance, the virtual onsite dives deep into system architecture, API design, and product collaboration. The final stage is highly collaborative, giving you the opportunity to meet key leadership and team members to ensure a mutual cultural fit.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression of a candidate through the hiring pipeline. You should use this visualization to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate sufficient time to practice coding fundamentals before the initial technical screen, and system design concepts before the virtual onsite. Keep in mind that while the stages generally follow this order, the team may adapt the technical focus based on your specific area of expertise.

Coding & Problem Solving

The coding assessment at Fora Travel focuses on practical, real-world programming tasks rather than highly abstract competitive programming. The interviewers want to see how you approach a problem, structure your code, and handle edge cases.

Be ready to go over:

• Array Manipulation & Sorting – Efficiently merging, filtering, and sorting datasets with attention to memory and runtime efficiency.
• Edge Case Handling – Identifying and gracefully managing null inputs, empty structures, and unexpected data formats.
• Code Readability & Cleanliness – Writing self-documenting code with clear variable naming and modular structures.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Custom memory allocation considerations, in-place array transformations, and stream processing.

Example scenarios:

• Merging two sorted lists representing travel bookings while minimizing extra memory usage.
• Filtering and deduplicating a list of hotel properties returned from multiple API providers.

System & API Design

In the system and API design rounds, you are evaluated on your ability to architect scalable web applications and design clean, intuitive developer interfaces. The team values modular designs that can evolve as the business grows.

Be ready to go over:

• RESTful & GraphQL API Design – Structuring endpoints, payloads, and status codes to support complex client-server interactions.
• Data Modeling & Storage – Choosing between relational and non-relational databases based on data consistency and scaling needs.
• Integration Patterns – Designing robust mechanisms to consume, transform, and sync data from external third-party travel APIs.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Event-driven architectures, message queues for asynchronous processing, and distributed caching strategies.

Example scenarios:

• Designing the API endpoints and database schema for a real-time flight booking and itinerary management system.
• Architecting a system to ingest and normalize hotel pricing updates from multiple global distribution systems.

Product & Culture Alignment

This evaluation area assesses how you collaborate with cross-functional partners and whether your working style aligns with Fora Travel's collaborative and user-focused environment.

Be ready to go over:

• Collaboration with Product Managers – How you navigate ambiguous requirements and negotiate technical trade-offs with product owners.
• User-Centric Decision Making – Demonstrating that you consider the end-user experience when making architectural or technical choices.
• Feedback & Adaptability How you receive constructive feedback and adapt to shifting priorities in a startup environment.

Example scenarios:

• Describing a situation where you had to simplify a technical feature to meet a critical business launch date.
• Explaining how you handled a disagreement with a designer or product manager regarding a feature's implementation details.

As a Software Engineer at Fora Travel, your daily work is centered around building and improving the core platform that powers the modern travel advisor ecosystem. You will be responsible for translating product requirements into robust, high-performing software solutions.

You will collaborate closely with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define, scope, and deliver new features. This includes building intuitive user interfaces for advisors, optimizing backend workflows, and ensuring the seamless integration of external travel supplier APIs.

Additionally, you will play an active role in maintaining system health, refactoring legacy code, and contributing to engineering best practices. Whether you are optimizing a database query, designing a new microservice, or mentoring junior team members, your contributions will directly support the growth and reliability of the platform.