In June of 2018, we welcomed an energized cohort of interns to our London office for the start of their career journeys at Expedia Group. For many of them, the intern program was the very first stop in their careers. Fast forward to today, we’re delighted to be celebrating the fifth year anniversary of six interns turned full-time Expedians that have been powering global travel for everyone, everywhere, with us!

In part two of this blog series, we caught up with two former interns to find out about their exciting career journeys so far. To say a lot has happened in the last five years is an understatement, and there is no doubt that they have an exciting future ahead.

Jakub Uher– Software Development Engineer II

Tell us about your current team

I am part of the Experience Manager team, which manages our internal CMS as well as the infrastructure around it.

Tell us about your current role

I am a Software Development Engineer currently working on CMS that allows multiple brands and partners to create content for all domains we support. Usually working with frontend and backend services to ensure smooth connectivity between all components in our system.

Tell us about your career journey at Expedia Group so far

I started as an intern in the Blacksmith team, which is now the URL platform team responsible for managing all URLs across all brands we support. Since then, I’ve moved to the Experience Template Squad, which is responsible for revamping how we render pages to our users to ensure a consistent experience across all devices using shared UI components and templates. During my time at Expedia, I have had the opportunity to work and learn alongside brilliant minds. I had an amazing mentor who taught me countless things and was always happy to help and talk about any issue. Since I’ve joined, I’ve been working on backend and then frontend apps. By working on both sides of the tech stack, I’ve gained experience tackling a lot of different problems, from the internal server on the API side to not rendering components correctly on the frontend app. Now that I think about it, making mistakes was just part of the journey to becoming a full-stack developer.

What advice would you share with an Apprentice, Intern, or Graduate starting at EG?

Do not worry about asking a bad question, there are no bad questions, just bad answers. Be curious, but most importantly read the manual from top to the bottom, it is very easy to miss something which breaks everything.

What do you enjoy the most about working at Expedia Group?

The people. We have a great culture and collaborations across teams. I truly do learn something new every day.

Andreea Paduraru– Software Development Engineer II

Tell us about your current team

I am part of the Expedia Group Data Lake team, which provides various data services, including data landing, optimization and federation for all EG teams.

Tell us about your current role

I am a Software Development Engineer contributing to projects such as a tool for data processing and repartitioning using Hive queries, an API for datalake resource management, as well as a few projects which the team has open-sourced like Waggle Dance and Beekeeper.

Tell us about your career journey at Expedia Group

I started as intern in the same team I am now in, but initially it was called Big Data Platform and it was part of the Hotels.com org. I had a few mentors in the team who helped me learn about Hive, Hadoop, Java project management and deployment tools, as well as best coding practices. It was a great learning opportunity, and my software development skills grew a lot in that year. When I returned to Expedia after my studies, and joined as a graduate, the team had gone through a few transitions, so there were new tasks that I was getting involved in, having more opportunities to grow. Over time, I started contributing to more and more of the team’s projects, so I gathered more knowledge and I was able to have a bigger impact in the team.

What advice would you share with an intern/graduate starting at EG?

Be very curious and ask questions – people really like initiative and coming up with new ideas!

What do you enjoy the most about working at Expedia Group?

Expedia Group has a great overall culture which really encourages collaboration and learning. And my team, it’s been a great experience to be a part of the Big Data Platform/EG Data Lake team, which has had 6 generations of interns and grads, now.

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