Initial Communication: I got an e-mail from the HR that I would be contacted by the hiring manager. The HR had setup a one hour phone interview with the manager. First Phone Interview: The interview was a mix of soft and technical skills. The manager asked questions around team size, type and complexity of projects managed. Asked questions around my team and how did I managed low performers. Questions were around technology challenges faced by Expedia and what would be my recommendations for the same. The interview went well and since I was working in Amazon as a manager, i did not find the questions hard or un-necessary After two to three days, I was invited over for an onsite interview at their Bellevue HQ. The process went smoothly, I checked in, got name tagged and was awaiting my first interviewer. Instead I was met by the HR who informed me that there was a change of plan and that I would be meeting a separate set of people. No biggie, having been part of interviewing process at Amazon, I know this happens!!!! The first interview: The first gentlemen I met, was a senior dev who had recently become a manager. He did not introduce himself, did not give me his name or what he did, just came into the room asked me how would I write the code to find all common entries in two sets. (Wow!!!! Expedia, you need to have formal training of your interviewers cause this is very un-professional, never-mind being rude!) I asked, if I could use HashSets, to which he replied I could, I simply wrote the code where I iterated through the first set and looked for the entries in the other one. Not much challenging. He seemed annoyed that I solved the question in two minutes flat. He then proceeded to ask me questions around Dev QA relationship. Second Interview: Was with a program manager who asked me about the last bit of code I had written and then proceeded to ask me about the project and my role in it. He asked me why I was looking for a change cause what I was doing seemed way more interesting to him :) Third Interview: Was with a director of test who was filling in for my manager. She seemed nice and we had a good discussion around the role of QA at Amazon. I also ate my lunch during this interview Fourth Interview: Was with the director of technology. A great guy and an absolute delight to talk to. I had a great discussion with him and quite frankly the most relaxing and interesting interview of the day. We discussed technology and QA process and what we did to ensure a high TP system SLAs were met. Fifth Interview: Was with a principal SDET. He seemed like a sharp guy but unfortunately a terrible interviewer. He started off with introducing himself and proceeded to ask a question around an efficiency algorithm. The question was as follows: Given a method which takes in an array of numbers, where each number indicates the level of a wine barrel, the method outputs the most efficient set of barrels that can be returned which are full or near full. Example: We pass six barrels with them being 10 20 30 40 50 60 percent full, it should return (10+20+30+40 = 100), (50+50 = 100) and 10. We went through various ways to test it and how can we ensure the system was calculating it correctly, but he was looking for just one answer which I did not know. It is called "Answer Based Testing". Read up on it if you ever go for QA interview at Expedia. He seemed nice overall. Sixth and Final Interview: Was a test manager. He seemed like a nice guy and asked me to test an API for him. Simply asked me to think up of as many test cases as I can. The interview went fine. I was done with me in-house after this and left the office. I did not hear from them for next next three weeks after which they informed me that they did not wanted to proceed with the offer.

Applied on-line via the ExpediaJobs website. Recieved an automated response and a personal followup one week later. It took another week to set up a phone screen with the Dev Manager. Phone screen went very smoothly -- he seemed very knowledgable about Test and open about the team's need at the moment. 10 days later I had a full day of interviews. I am local to their HQ so no travel arrangements were needed. Every person I talked to had the words 'Senior' 'Director' or 'Architect' in their title -- they asked a lot of very probing questions around people management style, fit for team, Agile experience -- only one person had a technical question for me. The Test Architect drew a block diagram of a system on the board and had me describe my approach to testing it. The system was fairly simple but interacted with a lot of 3rd party back-end services. The intent of the question seemed to be to see if I could indentify where the complexity of this system was -- and where I would focus my time in testing. 2 weeks later found out that this position was filled internally but that transition had opened up another Test Manager position -- could I come in *again* for another round of interviews? Shorter this time around -- the hiring manager took me to lunch and had two other testers ask technical questions similar to the first round. Be prepared to think on your feet and ask lots of clarifying questions. Perceptions of the place: Beautiful building and surroundings! The people are very dedicated to Agile methods and are moving quickly on short development cycles.