Switching jobs this year wasn't easy either — all told I went through something like 7 rounds of interviews, and in the end the money didn't work out and the offer fell through, which was a shame.
This has some things in common with a post I made before. I noticed there aren't really any Expedia interview experience posts here related to Data Science, so a while back I interviewed for an Expedia DS III role over about two weeks.
Hope this helps some other people who are also job hunting.
The role was on the search team, I believe. Overall the process moved pretty fast, but there were just a lot of rounds. I also got the sense this team was pretty new — the hiring manager was still figuring out exactly who he wanted on the team.
Here's how it went:
a. Recruiter screen — the recruiter reached out for an HR screen in the second week after I applied. Very short, some basic housekeeping questions: introduce yourself, why Expedia, do you need sponsorship.
b. Hiring manager interview — this got scheduled quickly after, in the second week, 30 minutes. Honestly it was fairly technical and scenario-based. Questions included:
- When working with a client, once the model produces a result, how do you make sure the KPI is the right one for the client, and how does the model actually get it right?
- How much have you worked with attribution?
- How do you test and validate the outputs of your modeling results?
- How do you approach a dataset you're not familiar with, and how do you make sure you're using it correctly?
- A few other questions about attribution.
c. Case study — the hiring manager said on the spot that I could move to the next round: a case study. A few days later the recruiter sent over a fake sample dataset about hotel stays, and I had to analyze it and think about the KPI: what's the key driver behind the KPI, what does it look like, how would you improve it, what problems did you find in your analysis, and what additional data would you need to dig further.
The instructions said it should only take "a few hours" and specifically told you not to overcomplicate it. But going by the feedback I got afterward... a few hours really wasn't enough — you also had to put together a slide deck.
d. Final panel — after I submitted the case study, the hiring team reviewed it, and since they thought I was a good fit, they invited me to a Final Panel Interview: five rounds back-to-back, each 30–45 minutes.
- Director — very detailed, based on problems Expedia's platform is currently facing.
- Case study presentation to the whole panel (30 minutes) plus Q&A (15 minutes) — everyone asked questions, and they went into a lot of detail.
- Senior manager (stakeholder) — this one was probably the closest to a typical stakeholder interview.
- Director (technical) — this round was pretty rough, especially since the interviewer's English wasn't very good (I'm not just nitpicking here), and he'd go back and forth restating things at length. Every time he finished I'd have to repeat back a summary of what I thought he was asking. You had to guess what he actually meant — twice I had him repeat the question and he repeated it differently each time.
- Hiring manager wrap-up — we talked through the previous interviews, and he hinted that my presentation had gone well.
That took up basically half a day for me, and it was exhausting. I waited about a week after that, and the recruiter followed up with questions about salary and start date. In the end they lowballed me quite a bit — pretty far off from what had been discussed earlier. When I asked why, the recruiter said the team felt the presentation wasn't clear enough, that I hadn't considered things comprehensively enough, and that the model I used wasn't sophisticated enough.
Overall, that feedback felt pretty different from the feedback I'd gotten from the earlier rounds, and I'd assumed the issue was something else entirely, not the case study.
On top of that, the role required relocation, they gave me very little time for the transition, and then lowballed the salary. I don't think this role is really the right fit for me right now.
I'm still feeling pretty mixed about it, honestly.
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