Role fit
Can you do the work? Your experience, craft, and judgment measured against what this role actually needs.
Candidate guide
Interviewing at Kindred
About this guide
We know interviewing is a two-way street and we’re excited to get to know you. This guide is designed to help you understand what you can expect throughout the interview process and how you can prepare for each step to show up as your best self.
Our interview process
Every interview process is tailored to the role, but most follow a similar journey. Your recruiter will let you know which steps apply to you.
Recruiter conversation
We’ll get to know your background and what you’re looking for next. You’ll get an honest picture of Kindred, the role, and where we are as a company — plus time to ask us anything.
Hiring manager interview
A deeper conversation with the person you’d work for, about the work itself: what you’ve done, how you think, and what this role actually needs. This is where the day-to-day gets real.
Practical assessment
The best way to show what you can do is to do a little of it. Depending on the role, this might be a take-home, a case study, or a working session with the team. We design these to look like real Kindred work, not a puzzle.
Team interviews
You’ll meet future teammates and the people you’d partner with across teams. We’re interested in how you think and collaborate, and you should be interested in whether you want to spend your days with us.
Final conversation
For some roles, a conversation with a leader about where the team is headed and how this role fits into it. A last chance for both of us to be sure.
References
We want to hear from the people who’ve worked closest with you. Near the end of the process, we’ll ask to speak with a few of them. Your recruiter will let you know if this is part of your interview process.
Any offer we extend is contingent on a background check, handled by a third-party provider. If anything surfaces, we’ll talk with you about it.
How to prepare
- 1
Read the job description closely, then spend a few minutes with our mission and our values.
- 2
Download the Kindred app and poke around. You don’t have to swap a home to get it, but knowing what the product feels like makes every conversation better.
- 3
Prepare real examples from your prior work experience. We’d love to hear about the impact you’ve made, challenges you’ve overcome, and lessons you’ve learned.
- 4
Bring questions. This decision is yours as much as it is ours, and we want you to leave every conversation with a real understanding of the role, the team, and our culture.
What we look for
Every interview is an opportunity to learn more about your experience, your approach to problem-solving, and how you collaborate with others. While every role is different, we consistently look for a few things.
Collaboration
How you communicate, how you partner across teams, and what you’re like when something goes wrong.
Values alignment
The five values we hold each other to and look for in the people we hire.
- Give a Damn
- You care deeply about the work and the people you build it with.
- Rewrite the Rules
- You’re resourceful and challenge the status quo to build something better.
- Be Human-First
- You lead with empathy, show up as yourself, and make room for others to do the same.
- Do the Right Thing
- You act with integrity, even when no one’s watching.
- Make Magic
- You go beyond and create moments that delight others.
Learn more about Kindred
Founding story
How Tas and Justine turned swapping homes with friends into Kindred.
Founding story
How Tas and Justine turned swapping homes with friends into Kindred.
How it all began.
Kindred started with a simple idea: travel shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for the wealthy, and homes shouldn’t sit empty while people struggle to afford trips.
Tas and Justine met at Opendoor, where they saw firsthand how trust and technology could transform how people think about their homes. They also shared a frustration: travel felt increasingly out of reach, especially as short-term rentals and hotels became more expensive and less personal.
In 2019, they started experimenting with home swapping. What began as swapping their own homes with friends quickly grew into a small community of people trading stays. The model worked because it was built on trust, reciprocity, and real human connection. Not transactions.
That’s how Kindred was born: a new way to travel that’s radically affordable, built on trust, and designed to foster authentic connection while supporting housing affordability in local communities.
Want to hear it directly from Tas and Justine?
Our mission and vision
What we’re building now, and the world we’re trying to reach.
Our mission and vision
What we’re building now, and the world we’re trying to reach.
Everything we do at Kindred ladders back to these two ideas: our mission is what we’re building now. Our vision is the world we’re trying to reach.
Mission
To make travel radically more accessible by building a global community powered by trust, generosity, and belonging.
We’re building something different at Kindred. By enabling members to host and stay in one another’s homes, we’re creating a new kind of travel that’s rooted in generosity, authenticity, and care.
Vision
A world where travel is built on trust, connection, and shared experiences — where anyone, anywhere, can feel at home.
We imagine a future where travel isn’t just a transaction; it’s an exchange that makes the world feel smaller, kinder, and more human.
Our values and beliefs
The five values we hire against, and the convictions underneath them.
Our values and beliefs
The five values we hire against, and the convictions underneath them.
Kindred’s values guide how we build, how we make decisions, and how we show up for each other and our members. They’re the foundation of our culture, and a big part of what we’re listening for when we talk with you.
Give a Damn
We are passionate and pour our hearts into our work. We care deeply about what we build, who we build it for, and who we build it with. We show up, sweat the details, and we take things personally.
In practice: During a national formula shortage, a teammate tracked down specialty baby formula and shipped it across the country to a colleague who couldn’t find any locally. No one asked her to.
Rewrite the Rules
We don’t believe that things have to be a certain way just because that’s how it has always been. We challenge the assumptions beneath our beliefs, which allows us to innovate, break through barriers, and push the boundaries of what’s possible. We’re relentlessly resourceful, and expect extraordinary results from ourselves and from each other. We aim high. We find a way.
In practice: We were told that “you can’t scale trust.” Kindred is the counterargument: tens of thousands of people exchanging homes with people they’ve never met.
Be Human-First
We are building a deeply human experience, and we practice radical authenticity and empathy ourselves to be able to do so. We consider the fears, needs, and personal stories behind every touchpoint and every decision. We foster an environment where people can be themselves and form real connections with others. We create the space to listen. We prioritize people.
In practice: Kindred members are welcomed and encouraged to record an intro video. It’s more work than uploading a profile photo, and it’s a big part of why the product never feels faceless.
Do the Right Thing
We hold ourselves to an extremely high bar for integrity. We take very seriously our responsibility to exercise sound business judgment, protect our members’ interests, and run a safe, inclusive, and consistent operation for everyone involved. When making any decision at all, large or small, we seek to always be able to put our hands on our hearts and say that we did right by our members and our coworkers — especially when no one is watching.
In practice: When a cleaner reported that a host’s cat had gotten out, a teammate drove over to the home and circled the neighborhood looking for it. The cat had been in the closet the entire time.
Make Magic
We take our work seriously, but we know that life is all about the little things that add sparkle to your day: a thoughtful note, a surprise delivery, a shared laugh. These are the moments that make memories and add a dash of magic to our lives. We seek to create these moments of magic for one another, and for our members. We believe that one of our contributions to the world is to make it a little richer, a little warmer, and a little more delightful because we were there.
In practice: Handwritten notes left behind after stays. Gift exchanges organized for no reason other than that they’re fun. A company-wide channel we keep just for documenting the good stuff.
These are a handful of examples, not a checklist. What they have in common is that no one was asked to do them.
Our beliefs
At Kindred, our beliefs are the heartbeat beneath our mission, vision, and values. They reflect how we see the world and how we hope to change it. They remind us why we’re here: to create something generous, human, and fundamentally different from what exists today.
- People who give more should get more.
- The world is a whole lot smaller than you think. When you stop to get to know someone, you’ll realize you’re not strangers after all.
- People are generally good.
- Being generous with others just feels good.
- Spontaneity, adventure, and human connection are important parts of a well-lived life.
- It’s a shame to let something go to waste when someone in your community would be ecstatic to enjoy it.
- You don’t have to buy something to use it. Money isn’t everything.
- By working together, we unlock greater possibilities for ourselves and each other.
- To be worthy of trust, we have to sweat the details each and every time.
- It’s time to take back our travel experiences from the multinational conglomerates. Community-driven travel is a better experience and better for the world.
- We’re not for everyone. We’re for the Kindred spirits — the generous at heart, the ones with optimism that there’s a better way to do things and the boldness to try.
- Living a travel-rich lifestyle shouldn’t be inaccessible. You shouldn’t have to buy a second home to experience having a second home.
Our approach to compensation
Published ranges, no negotiation games, and the reasoning behind both.
Our approach to compensation
Published ranges, no negotiation games, and the reasoning behind both.
We believe compensation should be fair, transparent, and human-first.
Compensation conversations are often opaque. Candidates are expected to negotiate, philosophies go unstated, and it’s hard to know how decisions actually get made. We’ve deliberately taken a different approach that’s grounded in fairness, transparency, and consistency.
What you can expect
Every open role includes a salary range in the job posting. Those ranges are set using job function, level and scope, location, market data, and benchmarks — not by guessing what a candidate will accept.
We’ll talk about compensation openly from the start, so by the time we make an offer, nobody is surprised.
No guesswork, no games
We don’t anchor low and wait for you to negotiate up. Your pay shouldn’t depend on your willingness or comfort with negotiation, and people doing similar work should be paid consistently. So we use the same criteria, the same market data, and the same guidelines for everyone — and we aim to land on a number that genuinely reflects the role and your experience the first time.
Total compensation
We believe supporting our people means investing in the whole person, not just the work they do. That’s why our total compensation philosophy includes:
- Competitive salaries benchmarked by role and location
- Equity grants for all full-time employees
Transparency and equity
Compensation decisions at Kindred follow structured criteria and a consistent process. We run annual pay equity reviews to identify and correct any unintended disparities, and we review our salary bands regularly to keep them competitive with the market.
Individual compensation is always private, but our philosophy and our process aren’t. We want you to understand not just what we offer, but why we’ve chosen to do it this way.
Our benefits
Why our benefits look the way they do, and what that says about us.
Our benefits
Why our benefits look the way they do, and what that says about us.
We believe work should support a life well-lived, not compete with it.
That’s not a slogan we arrived at after the fact; it’s the reason our benefits look the way they do. A few of the principles behind them:
The whole person, not just the work
Comprehensive health coverage, fully paid parental leave for every path to parenthood, real fertility support, and a four-week sabbatical after five years — because a sustainable pace produces better work than a heroic one.
Living the product
Kindred credits and a travel stipend aren’t a perk we tacked on. Staying in member homes is how you build genuine intuition for what we’re making and who we’re making it for.
Connection on purpose
Distributed teams don’t become close by accident. A connection stipend, twice-yearly offsites, and a company-paid trip to HQ exist because proximity has to be funded when it isn’t the default.
Managing your own time
Flexible time off with no accrual or cap only works if people actually use it, which is why we encourage a minimum rather than police a maximum.
Benefits aren’t separate from the work. They’re part of how we show up human-first.
Where to find us
Remote-first, with offices in San Francisco and London — plus where to follow along.
Where to find us
Remote-first, with offices in San Francisco and London — plus where to follow along.
Frequently asked questions
How and when should I expect to hear back regarding my application?
How and when should I expect to hear back regarding my application?
We review applications on a rolling basis and aim to get back to you as quickly as possible. If your experience aligns with what we’re looking for, a member of our recruiting team will reach out to you via email to discuss next steps. Timelines can vary depending on the role and volume of applications, but you can generally expect to hear from us within 1–2 weeks of applying.
How long does the entire hiring process take?
How long does the entire hiring process take?
Every role is different, but most interview processes take between 3–5 weeks from the initial recruiter conversation to a final decision. Your recruiter will keep you updated throughout the process.
Where do interviews take place?
Where do interviews take place?
Most interviews will be conducted virtually over Google Meet. If we’d like to meet in person, your recruiter will let you know.
What should I wear?
What should I wear?
Whatever makes you feel comfortable and confident. We’re a casual company and there’s no expectation for formal attire.
Can I use AI during the process?
Can I use AI during the process?
AI is part of how we work at Kindred, so it can be part of how you interview. For the practical assessment, use the tools you’d actually use on the job and tell us where you did. What we’re evaluating is your thinking: the judgment calls, the tradeoffs, and why you landed where you did. For live conversations and interviews, we ask that you go unassisted, so we can get to know you.
Have more questions?
Our team is continuously working on building more candidate resources to support a transparent interview experience. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, please check in with your recruiter who is your partner in this process and is here to answer any questions you have along the way.