Expedia SDE-1 — behavioural OA, DSA, and an ML-heavy second interview

Background

Final-year CS student at NIT Jaipur. The role was SDE-1 via a summer internship — ₹40,000/month stipend, converting to a full-time CTC of 40 LPA.

Round-by-round

Round 1 — Online assessment

Two hours, and mostly behavioural and critical thinking questions rather than pure technical content.

Round 2 — Technical test

One hour covering DSA, aptitude and CS fundamentals together. On the DSA side I worked through problems involving prefix sums and binary search.

Round 3 — First interview

The interviewer had close to 18 years of experience, which made the round feel especially thorough. Two DSA problems — one built around the sliding window / two-pointer technique, and a variation of the classic trapping rain water problem — plus a set of behavioural questions.

Round 4 — Second interview

A longer, 1.5-hour round with a Machine Learning engineer. My resume leaned heavily into ML, and the questions reflected that: PCA and LDA concepts, some system design, and DSA including a question involving Kadane's algorithm.

Verdict

Selected — SDE-1 internship converting to 40 LPA.