Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Kraken with 2.8 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.7% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 30 days to get hired, when considering 4 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Kraken overall takes an average of 25 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Kraken as a Software Engineer according to 4 Glassdoor interviews include:
Personality test: 17%
One on one interview: 17%
Group panel interview: 17%
Background check: 17%
Skills test: 17%
Phone interview: 17%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Kraken (London, England) in Dec 2024
Interview
Initial call with HR was fine. It's what one would expect from any SWE process at that point. Nothing particular to note.
Then there's a take home task. No option to avoid it. When I got the spec for it, it said that it would require about 6h of time to complete, which is IMO a pretty unreasonable amount of time to ask candidates to spend doing a take home.
The take home itself isn't too hard, but one thing that really tripped me is that they give you a fixture with some data. This fixture has a header and a footer. The take home doesn't really talk about the header and footer, and just points to some documentation about the body of the fixture. It's extremely hard to find documentation for the header and footer. I thought I'd show some attention to detail by finding the documentation for it, which took a while. At the end of the day, being good at finding and reading documentation is a big part of what it is to be a good engineer, and I do this daily at work.
In the end, I got some feedback saying that it looked like I spent too much time on the header and footer and that it wasn't required. Perhaps they should consider either removing the header and footer or telling candidates that they shouldn't focus on that, lest they waste time with it.
I'd personally avoid interviewing here, just from the take-home assignment I can see that the engineering culture is not great.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It's a Django app to parse some files and put them in a database.
The interview process was exceptionally smooth, well structured, and professionally managed. Communication was clear from the offset and throughout, expectations were transparent, and each stage felt organized, efficient, and respectful of my time.
I applied online. I interviewed at Kraken (Manchester, England) in Jun 2026
Interview
Four rounds long. 1st round was an introduction call. 2nd round was a take home coding task, which took me about an hour and a half. On this stage make sure to write code to production quality - they will read it and ask you about it in the next round. 3rd round was a basic technical interview, including a section going over your solution to the 2nd round task. The 4th round is a white board interview, where you’re given a task and asked to propose a solution, in conjunction with two other engineers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the release process at your current employer, from ideation all the way to it being deployed in production, and how would you improve it?
I applied online. I interviewed at Kraken (London, England) in Feb 2026
Interview
Application
I applied through Indeed. The process took 1 month. I interviewed at Kraken (UK) in Feb 2025
Interview
1st stage: Had a chat with a wonderful recruiter, set the stage for the whole interview process. Discussions about the company structure, team I would be working it, salary expectations and general question regarding motivation for joining the team.
2nd stage: Take home test. A django command line app for parsing file(s). Here, they evaluate you on taking on an ambiguous task and providing a scalable solution. Document your assumptions properly.
3rd stage: Further technical discussion about the task. Discussing approach, decisions taken and tradeoffs. How can the app be extended.
4th stage: The final stage. Focuses on your technical skills and the wider Python/Django ecosystem—discussions around ways of working.
After the last interview, the offer came within 30 minutes.
I really enjoyed working with my recruiter (Brad). He was super supportive.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
1st technical interview
Discuss your approach for taking on the technical task.
How do you approach testing?
How can we make this app more robust to handle more/large files?
You held data in memory before bulk creating. How would you handle OOM issues?
2nd technical interview(last stage)
They generally ran through my resume and asked questions.
Testing, App performance, CI/CD, Microservices (Advantages/Disadvantages)