Kik Interactive, known simply as Kik, rose to fame as one of the most popular messaging apps during the early 2010s. With its focus on anonymity and ease of use without a phone number, Kik carved out a unique niche and attracted millions of users. However, stiff competition from larger rivals led to a decline in active users. Still, Kik’s journey is an insightful one for those interested in the world of tech startups.
As a potential candidate looking to join Kik’s team, you need to prepare for the company’s rigorous hiring process. Here are the top 20 most common Kik interview questions to expect and tips on how to ace them:
1. Walk me through your experience designing, building and managing mobile applications.
Kik’s product is a mobile messaging app, so expect questions probing your hands-on experience developing mobile apps. Interviewers want to assess your technical skills and gauge your understanding of the mobile landscape’s unique challenges and best practices
Structure your response by choosing relevant projects that highlight your expertise across the mobile development lifecycle. Discuss key elements like optimizing performance for mobile devices, designing intuitive user interfaces, leveraging device capabilities like camera and GPS, implementing push notifications, and releasing frequent updates. Quantify your impact and demonstrate that you can deliver high-quality mobile experiences.
2. How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the mobile app industry?
The mobile app space evolves rapidly. Interviewers want to ensure you have the curiosity and drive to keep your skills current. Demonstrate that you actively keep up with industry advancements by describing how you read relevant blogs/forums attend conferences experiment with new tools, and participate in coding meetups. Share examples of how you’ve implemented modern features or leveraged new device capabilities in your projects. Convey your passion for continuously learning in this dynamic field.
3. What experience do you have working in Agile development environments?
Agile is popular in the mobile dev world, so highlight your hands-on experience with Agile values, workflows, and tools. Talk about your involvement in scrums, sprints, and reviews. Share examples of how you’ve actively contributed to building Agile team culture, optimized workflows, and delivered iterative releases. Metrics showing your impact on improved team velocity and product quality will strengthen your response.
4. How would you improve the performance of an existing mobile application?
Performance is crucial for mobile apps, so interviewers want to know you have optimization skills. Discuss strategies like minifying code, lazy loading components, caching data locally, reducing image sizes, and eliminating unnecessary renders. Share instances where you’ve diagnosed bottlenecks through profiling tools and resolved issues using the latest optimization best practices. Convey your product mindset focused on delivering smooth 60fps experiences.
5. What key metrics would you track to measure the success of a mobile app?
Analytics literacy is highly valued. Articulate the metrics you would track, like daily/monthly active users, session length, retention rates, crash rates, and conversion funnels. Then explain how you would segment users, set benchmarks, analyze trends, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth, engagement, and revenue. Share examples of how your metrics-focused approach led to tangible improvements for mobile products you’ve worked on.
6. How would you go about reducing churn and increasing user retention in a mobile app?
User retention is critical yet challenging in mobile. Demonstrate strategies for maximizing retention by outlining your use of funnel analysis to identify drop-off points, cohort studies to isolate slipping segments, and A/B tests to trial engagement enhancements. Share retention boosting tactics like behavioral engagement triggers, social features, personalized onboarding, and notifications. Prove you can leverage data-insights to create sticky mobile experiences.
7. How have you dealt with bugs or defects in a live production mobile app?
Bugs are inevitable, so interviewers want to assess your systematic approach to resolving issues and your judgment in prioritizing critical fixes. Share your technical debugging process and tools used. Discuss how you identify high severity defects through usage monitoring and customer feedback. Explain your release processes, like staging rollouts and kill switches, to minimize disruption. Demonstrate your relentless focus on delivering seamless mobile experiences.
8. What are some key differences in designing user interfaces for mobile versus web?
Great mobile UI requires specialized design practices. Discuss considerations like smaller screens, touch inputs, device orientations, thumb reach, and gestures. Contrast minimalist mobile design vs. more complex web layouts. Share examples of intuitive UIs you’ve created using principles like clear visual hierarchy, hidden menus, and bottom navigation. Demonstrate your user-centric design process tailored for mobile.
9. How do you balance innovation with the technical constraints of mobile devices?
Resource limitations require disciplined innovation. Discuss strategies like assessing device capabilities before designing features, profiling resource usage during development, and optimizing aggressively. Share examples of innovative features you implemented while adhering to mobile limits. Prove you can innovate strategically by extracting maximal impact within technical constraints.
10. What experience do you have with Apple’s design principles and interface guidelines?
For iOS roles, you must demonstrate Apple design expertise. Discuss your application of Apple’s philosophy across UI, UX, and interactions. Give examples of apps that align with their human interface guidelines, such as consistency, deference, clarity, and depth. Reference your implementation of platform-standard interface elements like swipe gestures, tabs, and alerts. Showcase your design skills tailored for the Apple ecosystem.
11. What privacy and security considerations are important in developing a mobile messaging app?
Privacy is especially critical for messaging apps. Discuss strategies like end-to-end encryption, access control, and ephemeral messages. Highlight experience implementing authentication, preventing data leaks, and incorporating privacy-focused APIs/protocols like Signal Protocol. Convey your commitment to enabling secure communications without compromising user experience.
12. How would you design a mobile messaging application to efficiently handle high user volumes?
Scalability is key for high-volume messaging apps. Discuss solutions like horizontal scaling, load balancing, caching, and optimized data structures. Highlight your experience developing performant real-time communication systems. Share examples of scaling mobile architectures using cloud infrastructure and microservices. Demonstrate your ability to engineer robust messaging platforms.
13. What techniques would you implement on a messaging platform to detect and prevent abuse?
Safety is crucial for messaging apps. Discuss techniques like blocks/mutes, profanity filters, sentiment analysis to detect harassment, image/link scanning, and A/I moderation. Highlight any experience developing content moderation features while safeguarding user privacy. Outline strategies for both proactive abuse prevention as well as reactive abuse handling.
14. How would you approach implementing full-text search for an app like Kik?
Search is a complex mobile challenge. Discuss indexing message data, optimizing with bloom filters, maintaining real-time sync, and scaling search infrastructure. Highlight experience with search engines like Elasticsearch or SolrCloud. Outline how you’d optimize relevancy and performance, the two key pillars of effective search. Demonstrate your ability to tackle challenging technical problems.
15. What techniques would you use to optimize networking performance and costs for a messaging application?
Networking optimization is critical for mobile messaging. Discuss solutions like data compression, caching, request batching, binary protocols, offline modes, and adaptive bandwidth usage. Demonstrate your networking performance analysis skills using tools like Charles Proxy. Highlight mobile networking best practices you’ve applied to reduce data usage and battery drain.
16. How would you implement group chat features and optimize performance in a mobile messaging application?
Group chats pose complex technical challenges. Discuss data models like hierarchies, implementing presence indicators, efficient interfaces, sync strategies like differential sync. Highlight expertise optimizing mobile client-server communication for group chat use cases involving frequent updates. Showcase ability to deliver performant experiences even with chatty group communication patterns.
17. How would you implement sending and receiving money through a messaging application?
Payment capabilities expand messaging utility. Discuss integration methods like SDKs, designing intuitive payment interactions, securely storing user payment credentials, fraud detection, and error handling. Highlight any fintech experience, API knowledge, and demonstrate understanding of regional payment regulations. Prove you can technically support financial transactions within a messaging platform.
18. What techniques would you use to store messages efficiently on both mobile clients and server?
Optimized data storage is key for mobile messaging. Discuss solutions like normalized schemas, indexing, compression, caching frequently accessed data, and managing expiry of old messages. Highlight your experience architecting efficient mobile data solutions that balance performance, storage costs, and complexity.
19. How would you design push notifications to re-engage inactive users on a messaging application?
Push notifications are crucial retention tools. Discuss strategies like behavioral triggers, personalized content, testing notification frequency/timing using cohort analysis, localizing notifications, and easy dismissal. Share examples of campaigns that moved core metrics. Demonstrate your ability to deploy notifications judiciously to enhance engagement.
20. How would you implement encryption within a mobile messaging architecture?
Crypto expertise is highly valued. Discuss your experience with methods like AES and RSA for transport encryption, Key Derivation Functions for key generation, Certificate Pinning and ensuring trusted certificates. Analyze potential vulnerabilities
