Great interview - Nice interviewers and excellent HR dept who worked to make sure the interviewee experience was solid. This was sometime ago (pre-Covid) - but I distinctly remember a car and driver with my name card waiting to pick me up at the Seattle airport. Quite a cool experience for being just a regular guy.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Expedia Group in Mar 2012
Interview
I talked to an Expedia manager who came to my university's career fair and gave him my resume. After about 2-3 weeks he emailed me asking to set up a phone interview. During the interview he just asked a little bit about my resume and then asked me how I would test a vending machine. This went on for probably 15-20 minutes. He just wanted to see how much I knew about testing. He mentioned there were 4 positions open.
After about a week I got a call asking for my availability for in-person interview. However it took a while to set up in-person interview because it conflicted with another interview I had. The in-person interview was also for the whole day and with 6 different people so I guess it took a while to find time that suited everyone (3 weeks after the phone interview).
Finally I went to Expedia offices and interviewed with 6 different people which included Sr. Test Lead, Software Development Director, Engineering Manager, Test Manager, Test Engineer I, and Software Engineer II. Everyone was very nice including the HR Manager.
Software Dev II: Asked about my resume. He mostly had Java technical questions. I am still learning Java so I couldn't answer some of them (I know more C). Asked me to draw design diagram for a Tic-Tac-Toe Game.
Test Manager/Software Engineer Test I: More questions related to testing (eg black box testing), some other technical programming questions related to linked lists.
Engineering Manager: Mostly testing questions.
Software Dev Director: No technical questions. I general talking about my resume and how my previous work experience is more in R & D. Talked about how he wants his team to be more like Google. Wants to have more full-time employees compared to contractors.
Sr Test Lead: Again technical questions.
Overall, there were a lot more technical questions compared to behavioural. The questions were also hard but I think they wouldn't be too bad for someone who has undergrad degree in Software Engineering or Computer Science. I have a BaSc in Electrical Engineering and Masters in Biomedical so I don't have as much theoretical knowledge of software design.
I wasn't that interested in the position since I already had an offer from another company which suited my career goals better. After the interviews (which obviously didn't go well due to technical questions) I wasn't expecting an offer. They emailed me the next day saying there are moving on with someone else. I was a good experience. If you are interviewing just make sure they have prepared very well technically. Know Java inside and out since that's what they work with (including JUnit).
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
-What's the different between composition and inheritance
-Something about exception handling in Java
-Draw a design diagram of tic-tac-toe game on the board
-Asked about XML. Differences between element and attribute. Asked which properties of an object I should use as attributes and which ones has separate child tags.
-Asked to write a function to find the start point of "$" and ";" in a string
-Asked to write a regular expression to find text between "$" and ";" unless there was a space after "$".
-How do you know if a linked-list is circular (even a middle item could point to one of the previous items) if you know its size?
-How do you programmatically calculate the number of possibilities of stairs when you have n steps and some of them could be single steps and some of them could be double steps?
-What's the difference between final and finally in Java?
-What data structure would you use to implement a phone book
-How would you write a hash table retrieval function to get the phone number of a person given their name and postal code. One postal code could be associate with multiple phone numbers, and one name could be associated with multiple phone numbers.
-Do you know about different software architectures/design methods?
-SQL question: difference between HAVING and WHERE
-How to get distinct hotels from a database (they were looking for the keyword DISTINCT)
-Something about linking two tables in SQL (they were looking for the keyword JOIN)
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Expedia Group (Bellevue, WA) in Mar 2017
Interview
I was reached out by a recruiter and asked if interested. When I was positive about moving forward, he sent me a coding challenge which was quiet difficult (it included DP problems). I scored quiet well in the challenge so was called in for an in-person interview. Expedia flew me to their Seattle office. There I had 4 interview rounds. In 2 rounds they went over my resume points and asked me to provide approaches based on technologies I mentioned in my resume. Other 2 rounds started with initial talk about me followed by coding question (white board), these were way too simple as compared to coding challenge. The interviewers were very supportive throughout the interview and very helpful at places I got stuck. I received an email next day to interview from recruiter that I have been rejected, when asked for the reason, the recruiter said due to company policy he can not give those details. It was a good experience except the rejection as I was confident that I performed well.
I interviewed at Expedia Group (Bellevue, WA) in Nov 2013
Interview
The recruiter sent me emails asking for phone interview times. I did so, but they didn't reply to me afterwards. I think probably I replied them a little late.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Since I didn't go to the phone interview step, I don't have any questions asked.