Expedia Group interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 1

Expedia Group
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3 rounds | 6 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 8 Months
Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, OOPS, Recursion, OS, DBMS.
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Start from basic, don't jump to advanced topics
Tip 2 : Revise regularly.
Tip 3 : Make handwritten notes.

Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: Resume based shortlisting
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Make a single-page resume
Tip 2 : Use formal font and font color should be black

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Online Coding Test
Duration45 minutes
Interview date5 Sep 2022
Coding problem0

Psychometric Test: Psychometric Test is basically Expedia’s version of the Workstyle assessment. The duration of this round was 45 minutes, and scenario-based questions were asked. I would recommend going through Expedia Worklife principles and answering accordingly. This was also an elimination round and 83 students were selected for the next round.

02
Round
Medium
Online Coding Test
Duration90 minutes
Interview date6 Sep 2022
Coding problem2

Moving on to the coding round. This round was based on the HackerRank platform. The test contained 6 MCQ Questions and 2 DSA Based Questions.
MCQs were on the Core Subjects like OS and OOPs. DSA Questions were pretty easy, I’d say Easy-Medium of LeetCode.
After this round 12 Students were selected for the Offline Technical Interviews.

1. Identical sentences

Hard
40m average time
60% success
0/120
Asked in companies
UberVisaExpedia Group

You are given two sentences, ‘word1’ and ‘word2’, represented as an array of strings of size ‘n’ and ‘m’, respectively. You are also given an array called ‘pairs’. Each element in ‘pairs’ is of the form ‘[u, v]’ where ‘u’ and ‘v’ are strings.

Properties of the array ‘pairs’:
  1. If ‘[u, v]’ or ‘[v, u]’ is present in ‘pairs’, then the words (or strings) ‘u’ and ‘v’ are identical.
  2. If ‘u’ and ‘x’ are identical, and ‘v’ and ‘x’ are identical, then the words ‘u’ and ‘v’ are identical.
  3. Every word is identical to itself, i.e., the word ‘u’ and ‘u’ are always identical.

For two sentences, ‘word1’ and ‘word2’ to be identical:
  1. For every word (‘word1[i]’) in ‘word1’, the words ‘word1[i]’ and ‘word2[i]’ must be identical.
  2. ‘word1’ and ‘word2’ must have the same number of words.

Using the array ‘pairs’, you have to determine if ‘word1’ and ‘word2’ are identical.

Example :
‘word1’ = [“exceptional”, “coding”, “skills”]
‘word2’ = [“great”, “coding”, “talent”]
‘pairs’ = [ [“exceptional”, “good”], [“great”, “good”], [“skills”, “talent”] ]

For each word in ‘word1’, we have:
1. “exceptional” = “great”, because “exceptional” = “good” and “good” = “great”
2. “coding” = “coding”, as every word is identical to itself.
3. “skills” = “talent”, because [“skills”, “talent”] is present in ‘pairs’.

As every word in ‘word1’ is identical to the corresponding word in ‘word2’, the given sentences are identical.
Note :
1. The array ‘pairs’ can have words that are not present in ‘word1’ and ‘word2’.
2. Each pair ‘[u, v]’ in ‘pairs’ is unique, and if a pair ‘[u, v]’ is present, then there will never be a pair ‘[v, u]’.
3. You do not need to print anything; it has already been taken care of. Just implement the function.
Problem approach

Every uncommon word occurs exactly once in total. We can count the number of occurrences of every word, then return the ones that occur exactly once.

Try solving now

2. Frequency In A Sorted Array

Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
SprinklrOlaUrban Company (UrbanClap)

You are given a sorted array 'ARR' and a number 'X'. Your task is to count the number of occurrences of 'X' in 'ARR'.

Note :
1. If 'X' is not found in the array, return 0.
2. The given array is sorted in non-decreasing order.
Problem approach

-HashTable + Sort: We use HashTable to count the occurrence and sort the entries based on the occurrence, then build the string.
-HashTable + Heap(Maxheap): We use HashTable to count the occurrence and build the heap based on the occurrence, then build the string.

Try solving now
03
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration75 minutes
Interview date7 Sep 2022
Coding problem4

The Interviews were conducted in offline mode. Both Interviews were conducted for all 12 students. Both the interviews were based on DSA and Behavioural questions.
Interview Round 1: The interviewer(SDE 2) asked me to introduce myself, and after that, he introduced himself as well. After a casual chat about his work at Expedia, he asked me about my projects, not very technical just an overview. He also asked about the time complexities of various sorting algorithms(Insertion sort, Heap sort, quick sort, merge sort) and also some Data Structures(Heap, Map, BST, LL, BT). Later, he started with the DSA part.

Interview Round 2: This round was taken by a senior SDE at Expedia. After the introduction, he asked me about the projects and what type of difficulties I faced during the projects and the position of responsibilities. Later on, he asked me about some DSA problems.

1. Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters

Moderate
30m average time
65% success
0/80
Asked in companies
AdobeInformaticaIntuit

Given a string input of length n, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters i.e return a substring that does not have any repeating characters.

Substring is the continuous sub-part of the string formed by removing zero or more characters from both ends.

Problem approach

The idea is to scan the string from left to right, keep track of the maximum length Non-Repeating Character Substring seen so far in res. When we traverse the string, to know the length of current window we need two indexes. 
1) Ending index ( j ) : We consider current index as ending index. 
2) Starting index ( i ) : It is same as previous window if current character was not present in the previous window. To check if the current character was present in the previous window or not, we store last index of every character in an array lasIndex[]. If lastIndex[str[j]] + 1 is more than previous start, then we updated the start index i. Else we keep same i.

Try solving now

2. Minimum Path Sum

Moderate
15m average time
85% success
0/80
Asked in companies
OlaMathworksAmazon

Ninjaland is a country in the shape of a 2-Dimensional grid 'GRID', with 'N' rows and 'M' columns. Each point in the grid has some cost associated with it.


Find a path from top left i.e. (0, 0) to the bottom right i.e. ('N' - 1, 'M' - 1) which minimizes the sum of the cost of all the numbers along the path. You need to tell the minimum sum of that path.


Note:
You can only move down or right at any point in time.
Problem approach

There are two ways to reach the solution : 

1. Memoization – Starting from the top node, traverse recursively with each node, till the pathsum of that node is calculated. And then store the result in an array. But this will take O(N^2) space to maintain the array.
2. Bottom up – Start from the nodes on the bottom row; the min pathsum for these nodes are the values of the nodes themselves. And after that, minimum pathsum at the ith node of kth row would be the minimum of the pathsum of its two children + the node’s value, i.e.: 

memo[k][i] = min( memo[k+1][i], memo[k+1][i+1]) + A[k][i];

Try solving now

3. Add Two Numbers As Linked Lists

Moderate
20m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
SprinklrIBMDeutsche Bank

You are given two non-negative numbers 'num1' and 'num2' represented in the form of linked lists.


The digits in the linked lists are stored in reverse order, i.e. starting from least significant digit (LSD) to the most significant digit (MSD), and each of their nodes contains a single digit.


Calculate the sum of the two numbers and return the head of the sum list.


Example :
Input:
'num1' : 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> NULL
'num2' : 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> NULL

Output: 5 -> 7 -> 9 -> NULL

Explanation: 'num1' represents the number 321 and 'num2' represents 654. Their sum is 975.


Problem approach

Traverse both lists to the end and add preceding zeros in the list with lesser digits. Then call a recursive function on the start nodes of both lists which calls itself for the next nodes of both lists till it gets to the end. This function creates a node for the sum of the current digits and returns the carry.

Try solving now

4. Merge two sorted linked lists

Moderate
15m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
HSBCAmazonApple

You are given two sorted linked lists. You have to merge them to produce a combined sorted linked list. You need to return the head of the final linked list.

Note:

The given linked lists may or may not be null.

For example:

If the first list is: 1 -> 4 -> 5 -> NULL and the second list is: 2 -> 3 -> 5 -> NULL

The final list would be: 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 5 -> NULL
Problem approach

The strategy here uses a temporary dummy node as the start of the result list. The pointer Tail always points to the last node in the result list, so appending new nodes is easy. 

The dummy node gives the tail something to point to initially when the result list is empty. This dummy node is efficient, since it is only temporary, and it is allocated in the stack. The loop proceeds, removing one node from either ‘a’ or ‘b’, and adding it to the tail. When 

We are done, the result is in dummy.next.

Try solving now

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

How do you remove whitespace from the start of a string?

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