← Back to Directory

Expedia interview notes, page 3 of 4

Large Enterprises

Most of these Expedia write-ups come from Software Engineers (22), then Machine Learning Engineers (5) and Data Scientists (4). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (16), the system design round (7), the behavioral / leadership round (4) and the hiring manager screen (3).

36 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Expedia·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026
Interviewed at Expedia, got hit with a classic market sizing question about NYC hotel rooms. Pretty short interaction, nothing too wild.
  • How many hotel rooms are there in New York City?

“Market sizing.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Expedia software engineer interview with a coding problem that looked deceptively simple but had a subtle constraint I almost missed. The digit range for wildcards isn't 0-9, it's 0-8, which changes things a bit if you're not paying attention.
  • Given a string of digits and '?' wildcards (e.g. '08??840') and a target sum, replace each '?' with a digit from 0 to 8 (not 0 to 9) and return all strings whose digits sum to the target.

“I started writing a brute-force combination generator before I even clocked the 0-8 range thing.”

View Post

Expedia·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
First round for an MLE role at Expedia, basically a notebook-based case study centered on LLMs. The skeleton was already there so you're not starting from scratch, but you still have to implement the real pieces yourself.
  • Given a pre-built LLM training framework in a notebook, implement a tokenizer along with word-to-token and token-to-word conversion functions.
  • Write an optimizer and a loss function for the training loop, then verify the loss decreases over iterations.

“Having the framework handed to you sounds like a relief until you realize the tokenizer is actually the part that needs to work correctly for everything downstream.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Coding round at Expedia for a software engineer role. One question, string manipulation, nothing flashy but it took me longer than I expected to get the logic clean.
  • Implement the Count-and-Say sequence: given n, return the nth term, where each term is generated by reading the previous term aloud as consecutive digit groups (run-length encoding).

“I knew the pattern conceptually but fumbled the loop logic on the first pass.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Expedia for a software engineer role. Just one question but it had a lot of layers to it.
  • Tell me about a time you didn't fully trust a colleague. What caused the doubt, how did you navigate it, and what came out of it?

“This one made me pause longer than I expected.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Expedia software engineer interview with a coding problem that looks simple but has a few ways to approach it. Nothing too wild, just needed to know your array patterns.
  • Given an integer array and an integer k, count the number of contiguous subarrays that contain exactly k odd numbers.

“I went with the prefix count plus hashmap approach, tracking how many times each odd-number count had appeared and checking the difference.”

View Post

Expedia·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Expedia for an MLE role, focused entirely on building a text-to-image generation service from scratch. It was a long 45-ish minutes and the scope kept expanding every time I thought I'd covered enough ground.
  • Design a text-to-image generation service similar to DALL-E or Midjourney. Walk through the full system from user prompt submission to returned images.
  • How would you design the async API for image generation, including how clients know when their job is done?
  • How would you manage and scale a GPU inference fleet to handle diffusion model workloads efficiently?
  • How would you handle model versioning and run A/B tests across different versions of a diffusion model?
  • What does a safety pipeline look like for a system like this, covering both prompt filtering and output moderation?
  • How would you optimize costs in this system, especially given the expense of GPU inference at scale?
  • How would you handle abuse prevention and rate limiting for a public-facing image generation API?

“I started with the API layer and worked outward, which in retrospect was fine but I spent too long on the happy path.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Three coding problems for a software engineer role at Expedia. Nothing too wild but the second one on palindrome substrings had me second-guessing my approach the whole time.
  • Implement the run-length spoken sequence: starting from "1", each next term is built by reading the previous string and describing consecutive groups of identical digits as count-then-digit. Return the nth term.
  • Given a list of lowercase strings, for each string count how many non-empty contiguous substrings can be rearranged into a palindrome. For example, "aabb" gives 9.
  • Given a numeric string with some positions marked as '?', a target digit sum, and a constraint that each '?' can only be replaced by digits 0 through 8, return all completed strings whose digits sum to the target.

“Pretty mechanical once you see the pattern.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Coding round at Expedia for a software engineer role. Pretty standard DP problem, nothing too wild, but the space optimization part is where they seemed to care most.
  • You have a row of houses each with some amount of money. You can't rob two houses next to each other or the alarm goes off. What's the maximum you can steal?

“Classic house robber problem.”

View Post

Expedia·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Expedia coding screen, one algorithm question about rearranging an array so no two adjacent elements are equal. Pretty standard but the implementation tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Given an integer array, rearrange it so that no two adjacent elements are equal. A valid arrangement is guaranteed to exist. Return any valid result.

“The problem sounds straightforward until you actually try to code it.”

View Post