Expedia Interview Experience for SDE (On-Campus)

Recently Expedia visited my campus for both FTE and summer intern for SDE as well as product management. I sat in the interviews for SDE summer intern 2022.

The selection process consisted of a cappfinity assessment, an online coding round, and two technical as well as behavioral rounds.

Cappfinnity Assessment: This is a mandatory round for all interested candidates. No previous preparation is required for this round. As you are only asked for your action in a given situation. This isn’t an elimination round. The company only conducts this round to know their candidates better.

Online Coding Round (1 Hour): It comprised of 2 coding questions as follows :

• Determine minimum health required by a player in order to achieve a certain rank k given m new players will be introduced at each of the n new levels (Previous players are also to be considered at each level). The question could be done with the help of ordered maps. However few test cases showed TLE even with O(nlog(n)) time complexity.
• Given n nodes with 1 being the root node, there is a directional edge from j to i if (j < i) and (i%j==0). Given the two conditions count the number of routes to each edge. (This question was fairly easy and I did it with the help of a two-dimensional matrix. Although a few test cases didn’t pass due to O(n^2) time complexity)

6 MCQ questions comprising of topics relating to the balance factor of trees, oops basics and analyzing time complexity of a given code.

Technical And Behavioural Round 1 (60 – 75 minutes): The interviewer first began with a basic introduction. Then he moved to technical questions. In this round I was asked two technical questions :

• Given an array of distinct integers and a target, h is it possible to reach the target by adding any two elements of the given array? I did the question using hash maps in O(n) of time complexity and the interviewer was satisfied. 
• The second was the famous celebrity problem which I did use stacks with a time complexity of O(n) and auxiliary space complexity of O(1).     

The interviewer then asked me behavioral questions like giving a hypothetical situation with a co-worker and what will be my input. The round concluded with this. 

Technical And Behavioural Round  2 (60 – 75 minutes ): The round took place on the same day and in succession to round 1. In this round, the interviewer focused on my projects and my DSA-solving skills. 

The interview began with a discussion of my contribution to the project. I was then asked about various forms of normalization of tables in DBMS. The interviewer then asked me two coding questions as follows :

• Execute push, pop, and get min() operations of the stack without using the inbuilt functions. 
• The second question was based on a circular queue.

Then as a part of behavioral, I was again asked about hypothetical situations. I strongly recommend preparing for these questions ahead of time.

Note: Interview rounds aren’t elimination rounds. That is the candidate has to sit for both rounds and based on their performance in both rounds the candidate is either selected or rejected.

All in all the interview process was very smooth. The interviewers were friendly. At the end of the interviews, I was fairly confident.

And at 7:00 pm on the same day, the results were announced. And I was selected as an SDE intern at Expedia.