Expedia Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — HR Ghosted for a Month Before the Virtual Onsite

I interviewed for the global payments team. The phone screen was in mid-February, then HR just ghosted me. I emailed to ask about the result and only got a reply five days later. The virtual onsite ended up landing almost a month late.

After the self-introduction in every round there was a small Expedia values behavioral question.

Round 1 was coding with the interviewer — a LeetCode question. After I finished it in 20 minutes, they felt it wasn't enough and gave me another one: scattered palindrome. You're given a list of strings, and for each string you have to compute how many of its substrings can become a palindrome by swapping characters. For example, aabb has 9.

Round 2 was with the hiring manager — some behavioral questions. I found out his team was already fully staffed, but other teams wanted to use this interview of his to hire people. His English was mediocre too — every time I finished answering, he needed 4-5 seconds to check the live translation. The conversation was pretty forgettable. One question that stuck with me: "Tell me a time when you didn't trust your colleague." (I... ...)

Round 3 was coding again. The problem: given a string like "08??840" with sum = 24, and each "?" having a max value of 8, give all possible strings so the sum equals 24. The results included:

• "0804840"
• "081340"
• "082240"
• "084040"

It's really just backtracking DFS — a bit annoying to code. I wrote the basic code and the backtracking framework but didn't get it right, and with 10 minutes left I couldn't be bothered to keep going, so I gave up.

Round 4 was system design with the interviewer. The question was related to payments and it left me completely lost — I had no idea what I was even supposed to do. Since it came right after round 3, I already knew I wasn't going to pass, so I just answered halfheartedly and moved on. I took a screenshot of the question but couldn't get it to upload. I felt like I was just there to fill a headcount quota, so I just treated the whole thing as a mock interview.

Addendum (2026-03-10, 06:23 +08:00): Correcting the test case outputs — they should be "0804840", "0813840", "0822840", "0840840". It's really about first working out all the sequences for those two question marks, so it's backtracking for sure.