Hello! My name is Mridul Chopra, and I work as a Senior Software Development Engineering Manager on Expedia Group’s (EG) Loyalty Platform Team, based out of Gurgaon, India.

It has been an incredible journey so far. I have had wonderful opportunities to drive complex initiatives for our brands and partners, while leading a high performing team of 40+ technologists. I worked to design, develop and rollout a world class north-star loyalty platform that is secure, scalable, and reliable, to drive the rewards programs across our EG brands and partners. It is a matter of pride for me and my teams to power one of the largest rewards program out there – One Key.

In my free time, I love to listen music, watch aviation videos, lift weights, practice yoga and travel with my family and friends.

What are your key learnings from leading loyalty platform development at EG?

Given that the existing platform already served millions of loyalty members – it was crucial to start testing the platform with real production traffic without impacting our customers. We started Shadow Testing to exercise the platform, program, and performance in a parallel stack through comparative analysis of the business and technical metrics to reduce risk before going live. Shadow testing for us meant testing an offering before it goes live to real customers. This allowed us to test the loyalty platform for functionality and for scale in handling production equivalent traffic.

The north-star loyalty platform uses Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to ensure that important business moments are detected, captured, and relayed to different consumers. The loyalty domain had various use cases where actions needed to be taken after an event occurred. This architecture provided loose coupling, scalability and real time processing of data.

Making quick, incremental progress in a constantly changing environment is always important especially for multi-quarter projects. The roadmap was sliced into milestones and then followed by show-and-tell meetings with leadership, giving them the required clarity on platform progress and feedback early on. This way we incorporated feedback early in development cycles with less expense.

What excites you about working at Expedia Group?

When people come together, magic happens. I’ve always been excited by making an impact and collaborating with talented team members, stakeholders and leaders. EG provides excellent opportunities for networking with our leaders, and with finding mentors. I’ve learned new perspectives through networking and mentoring, such as how to approach handling difficult and complex situations. I am also grateful to have the opportunity to meet with people from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences, gaining a broader perspective on the industry and the challenges it faces.

What helped you most to embrace the EG culture?

Being a successful leader today is all about what you bring to the table, choosing fearlessly and owning your decisions. Aligning my project goals with the company’s values helped me to stay focused on what is important. I’m able to prioritize tasks for myself, and my team, to ensure we’re always creating top-line and bottom-line impact. This has helped me to gain great amount of trust and support from my teams, peers, and leadership.

To perform and be our best selves every day, EG values the social, physical, and mental welfare of its employees and fosters a terrific fun-filled workplace. The icing on the cake is that EG genuinely values diversity and inclusion and actively promotes it throughout the company. As a leader, participating in these initiatives has always helped me to understand and appreciate different perspectives, and make me feel like a valued leader at EG.

We are looking for top technical talent in various areas such as Mobile Engineering, Software Engineering, Product and Program Management to help drive the development of our key platform capabilities, seamlessly roll out new features, and continuously raise the bar on our operational excellence and engineering practices.