Expedia Interview Experience for Software Developer Role (Gurgaon)

Coding Test: The coding test was conducted on Hackerrank platform. There were 10 MCQs and 2 coding questions which were as follows:

1. Check for Balanced Brackets in an expression (well-formedness)

Given an expression string exp, write a program to examine whether the pairs and the orders of “{“, “}”, “(“, “)”, “[“, “]” are correct in the given expression.

Input: exp = “[()]{}{[()()]()}” 
Output: Balanced
Explanation: all the brackets are well-formed

2. Minimum possible travel cost among N cities in 2D plane

I solved both the questions and qualified for the interviews.

Technical Interview 1: The interviewer gave me two problems to solve: 

1. Given a string (Eg. “ExpediaIndia”), output an array containing the distance of all the elements from the nearest occurence of a given character. (Eg. ‘a’). Output Array would be: {6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 1, 2, 2, 1, 0}

2. A easy-medium level array question, but he focused on me getting the most optimal approach.

Technical Interview 2: The interviewer gave me 3 problems:

1. Find the equilibrium point in a given array, i.e, a point where the sum of all left elements is equal to the sum of all right elements.

2. Sort an array that contains only 0s, 1s and 2s.

3. Detect loop in a linked list and remove it.

This interviewer was very sweet and guided me through the problems quite well. She was also a great listener. 

Both the interviewers focused primarily on optimal approach so have a thorough knowledge of time and space complexity.

The scores of both the rounds were calculated and the candidates were shortlisted for the final HR round. I was one of them too.

HR Round: I enjoyed this round a lot, because the energy of the HR was great. He was a great listener as well and asked smart questions, some of which were as follows:

1.Tell me about yourself.

2. Tell me more about your projects, explain your role if they were team based projects.

3. Why expedia? 

4. What do you mean by a good work culture?

5. What if a person in your team disagrees with you, how will you handle it?

6. What kind of work do you want? Why?

7. Where do you see yourself in five years?

All of these questions sound very generic but were fun to discuss because it was a casual atmosphere. The direction of the interview depends on you and how you answer the questions, so have good energy and humor. Spew your magic! All the best!

(P.S. I got selected.)