Expedia Group Technology — InnovationHow Expedia Group is getting organizationally and operationally ready for agentsPhoto by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on UnsplashAt Expedia Group™, agents are showing up across the business: traveler-facing trip planners, partner tools, internal copilots, log readers, and a growing number of workflows that make teams say, “We tried this, and it was surprisingly useful.”That energy is exactly what AI should unlock. But without shared foundations, it can also create fragmented technology choices, partial governance stories, and promising experiments that…
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Expedia Group Technology — InnovationA framework for how we build, deploy, and evolve AI systems for impact and scalePhoto by Florian Wehde on UnsplashThere’s an important distinction between Artificial Intelligence (AI) that just works today and AI that lasts at scale. Many companies optimize hard for the first one without ever asking whether they’re building the second.Velocity without discipline and strategic direction is a liability, not an asset. The hardest part of building AI at scale isn’t getting a model to work once. It’s building systems that continue to work, scale beyond…
Expedia Group Technology — InnovationUsing large language models to reveal bottlenecks in Spark SQL execution plansPhoto by Luis del RíoIf you’ve ever stared at a 300-plus-node physical plan at 2 a.m. trying to spot a missing broadcast or one cursed skewed partition, this is for you.Spark makes it deceptively easy to write complex SQL that looks correct but quietly turns into a performance and cost problem at scale. A query that runs fine on day one can slow to a crawl as data grows, joins get wider, and aggregations become more nested. Suddenly, jobs take hours instead of minutes, clusters…
Abstract Agent-driven end-to-end (E2E) tests add a new exploratory layer to testing, but should they replace traditional deterministic tests? We ran more than 200 agentic E2E workflows using the Playwright MCP, Playwright CLI, and agent-generated Playwright tests in test workspaces using non-production data to find out how agentic testing could fit into both our and…
Our Work Organization Framework JourneyPhoto by Daniel Watson @pexelsWhat Makes Cross-functional Collaboration Actually Work?In today’s cross-functional environments, the most impactful initiatives rarely live within the boundaries of a single team or person. Whether we’re building new product features, improving infrastructure, or tackling technical debt, success depends on seamless collaboration across multiple teams and roles, including engineering, product, design, analytics, and beyond.Think about when you’re making a big dinner for friends. You might be the main cook, but you need…
Leading while learningWhy great managers don’t have all the answersI used to think leaders had to have all the right answers. Now I know that the best ones have all the right questions.Early in my career, I admired managers who seemed to have everything figured out. They spoke with certainty, made quick decisions, and never hesitated. I assumed that was what leadership required: knowing more, proving more, and never showing doubt.Then, I became a manager myself. And I quickly realized something unsettling. I didn’t have all the answers. I had experience, sure, but every new challenge exposed…
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