Status : New grad, MS CS Top 50 CS school
Position : SDE1 at Expedia(EPS team)
Location : Seattle, Washington
Date : Sep, 2019
I applied to Expedia through referral and interviewed for Expedia EPS team in Sep’19. Got a call from recruiter within a week. He explained there will be total 3 rounds in the interview process.
Round 1 :
OA Hackerrank, 3 questions (2 Leetcode DP and one binary search question)
Round 2, Phone Screen:
The interviewer asked me fundamental Java questions regarding OOPS, basic data structure differences,sql join question and one simple array question: given 2 arrays find if 2nd array contains all the elements of array 1.
Heard next day that I got onsite interview:
Onsite was 5 rounds each 45 mins (3 with SDE, 2 hiring managers):
Interview #1: with sde:
Asked me about one of my project that caught his eye, discussed for 10 mins and then went on to the technical question:
Given meeting rooms and start and end time, give combinations of all rooms that can be used at the same time.
Example:
Input
[0,2],B[1,3],C:[3,5],D[6,8]
Output: AC,AD,BC,BD,CD,ACD,BCD.
Solution: Did it with Simple BFS, Also had to create my own DS for the Input, Created a ds with start,end time and had a function that accepted array of that DS like in meeting rooms.
Interview #2 with sister team’s hiring manager:
Asked me to draw ER diagram for a project of mine along with some sql tables.
Follow ups: Show no-sql tables of same and also as classes and objects. (didn’t seem impressed)
Technical question:
Given a scenario where everyone is standing in queue, you can either bribe one or two person to skip ahead in the queue. You cannot bribe someone who has bribed you. So given a final array, return number of people bribed.
Input:[1,2,5,3,4]
Output: 2 people got bribed
Interview#3 with sde:
Directly went to technical question:
Given any list create a binary search tree.(Open-ended question. Had to ask questions to get a full picture)
Follow up: Create a perfect BST
Interview#4 with sde:
Why Expedia?
Asked about projects.
Technical question:
Given a list that contains positive integers and zeros.Shift all zeros to end while maintaing order of the non-zero numbers.
I did it in O(2n). Asked for O(n) i.e. one single loop. Was able to do it
Interview#5 with team hiring manager :
One of the most fun interviewers I had till now.
He gave me question that didn’t have a perfect solution he just wanted to see my thought process, what kind of questions I ask and how I adapt to different scenarios.
Question was All the nodes are either ‘+’ or ‘-’ except for the leaf nodes. Had to calculate the value of the root. He wasn’t interested in the solution as I said but wanted me to discuss with him and come up with solution together.
Followup:
If there are different classes for leaf nodes, + nodes and - nodes. How will I manipulate my one function solution.
What are the extreme conditions and other test cases where the solution will fail.
Behavioral question : Tell me about a time you had a dispute with your superior or peer?
Questions I asked him at the end were(I normally ask these questions):
- What are the most imp things you want me to achieve in first 3 months?
- Culture of the team and company
- How do you see my skills and exp fitting the needs of your company?
- How is the performance measured at the company and in your team?
- When can I hear about a decision?
- Is there anything I can clarify for you?
Overall was a smooth process, got a reject though