Expedia's Rush to Hire AI Talent

Finding the right engineers drives Expedia's AI strategy.

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Expedia's chief technology officer, Ramana Thumu, told Skift on a recent visit to its new Silicon Valley offices that the company spent nine months studying which engineers get outsized gains from AI coding tools — and found the top 2-10% are producing exponentially more. Now Expedia is recruiting aggressively to find more of them.

Since June, it's hired at least 10 engineers away from Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Meta. The bet: identify high-leverage engineers, give them unlimited AI tokens, and spread their methods across the company. Whether those engineers stay — so close to their former employers — is the open question.

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