One of the worst interview experience I have ever had. I have been initially contacted by a recruiter (from Talentful, a company that apparently Expedia uses for hiring) who scheduled a first interview with the Hiring Manager.
It was supposed to be an "informal chat" as the recruiter mentioned, but it was actually a proper technical interview. Nevermind, I have been moved to the next stage.
The next stage is supposed to be a take home assignment about hotel ranking (Kaggle competition style), but the recruiter failed to send the link to access the project. At the very last minute, this step was replaced by a live coding session during the onsite interview (next step).
Finally, I did the onsite which consisted of 4 interview sessions (Live coding, statistics, machine learning theory, machine learning system design). of one hour each.
The live coding session was made of 2 exercises (one about linked lists and the other about sorting/hashing).
The statistics interview was more like a "traditional ML" interview, with some focus on hypothesis testing and distributions.
The machine learning theory was actually very much applied to a real ranking problem, and the final ML system design was more about general production and architecture settings given a problem.
Again, the recruiter failed to give any advice on every single interview, so I had to prepare completely blind, relying on just my past interview experience. I did interviews with other big tech companies, and all of them provide a much richer set of information to prepare for the interviews.
At the end, I still hoped to get the job because I had very nice chats with the people interviewing me, who all looked skilled and professional. I apparently did ok, but was rejected because of lack of experience (something that could be seen from my CV during the screening I guess...).
I still consider Expedia a nice place to work at, but they really need to do something with the recruiters' incompetency.
The whole process lasted about 2 months, with lack of communication and very poor timing from the recruiter side.
Better communication from the recruitment team is strongly advised.