Uber DevOps / SRE Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you had to design monitoring or alerting for a system that needed to work reliably across multiple regions or time zones. What challenges did you face with the global distribution?

2.Describe your experience building or maintaining infrastructure that needed to handle traffic spikes during major events or seasonal peaks. What was your scaling strategy?

3.Describe a time when you had to push a critical infrastructure change live quickly due to an outage or security issue. How did you balance speed with safety?

4.Walk me through a time you used metrics or monitoring data to identify and solve a performance problem that wasn't obvious from user complaints. What data led you to the root cause?

5.Tell me about a time when a major infrastructure change or new requirement forced you to completely redesign your deployment or monitoring approach mid-project. How did you pivot?

6.Tell me about a time you had to implement a security fix or compliance change across production systems under a tight deadline. What corners did you refuse to cut?

7.Our Kafka clusters process 5 billion events per day across rider trips and driver locations. You notice message lag spiking to 10 minutes during peak hours. How would you diagnose and resolve this bottleneck?

8.You're tasked with building a feature flag system that needs to handle configuration changes for millions of active trip sessions without causing service restarts. How would you architect this?

9.A microservice that handles driver location updates is suddenly consuming 4x normal CPU. The service hasn't been deployed in 3 days, but traffic patterns look normal. Walk me through your investigation.

10.You need to implement blue-green deployments for a payment processing service that handles billions in transactions. What are your key considerations for this migration strategy?

11.Design an auto-scaling solution for Uber Eats during major events like the Super Bowl, where order volume can spike 20x in specific cities within minutes.

12.Write a function that takes a stream of driver GPS coordinates and detects when a driver appears to be in an accident or emergency situation based on sudden movement pattern changes.

13.How would you build a health check system that monitors the availability of Uber's payment processing across 70+ countries, considering different payment methods and local banking regulations?

14.How would you design a deployment pipeline for Uber for Business that allows safe rollouts of new corporate travel features across enterprise customers without disrupting their existing booking workflows?

15.Walk me through how you'd design the infrastructure to support Uber's surge pricing algorithm that needs to recalculate prices every 30 seconds across all active markets based on real-time supply and demand.

16.Design a distributed configuration management system for Uber Eats that can push restaurant menu updates to millions of delivery apps within seconds without requiring app restarts.

17.Design a real-time data pipeline that processes driver location updates for 5 million active drivers globally and calculates ETAs for riders within 2 seconds. How would you ensure data consistency across regions?

18.Design the log aggregation and analysis infrastructure for Uber Freight that needs to process shipping events from millions of trucks while detecting potential delivery delays or route deviations in real-time.

19.Tell me about a time when you had to convince multiple teams to adopt a new infrastructure standard or process, but they were resistant to the change.

20.Tell me about a time when you had to advocate for significant infrastructure investment that other teams saw as unnecessary. How did you influence without authority?

21.Describe a time when you had to balance the speed demands of a product team with infrastructure reliability concerns. How did you navigate that tension?

22.Tell me about the most complex cross-functional incident response you've led. What made it challenging and how did you coordinate the teams?

23.Walk me through a time when you identified a significant infrastructure inefficiency that required executive buy-in to fix. How did you build the case and drive the initiative?

24.Describe a time when you had to lead a major infrastructure migration while ensuring zero impact to active trips or deliveries. How did you manage the technical and people challenges?

25.Uber's trip completion rate dropped from 97.2% to 96.8% over the last week across all markets, but our application monitoring shows no errors or latency spikes. Walk me through how you'd investigate this.

26.During major events like New Year's Eve, Uber Eats order volume can spike 15x normal levels in certain cities within a 2-hour window. Estimate how many additional servers we'd need to provision globally to handle this peak.

27.A critical payment processing service starts throwing timeout errors for 2% of Uber rides, but only in markets where we recently launched a new payment method integration. How would you isolate and resolve this?

28.You need to design a chaos engineering program for Uber's real-time location services that handle 5 million active drivers globally. What failure scenarios would you test and how would you measure impact?

29.Uber's driver app is consuming 40% more battery than last month across all platforms, and driver complaints about battery drain are increasing. There haven't been any major app releases, but we did roll out some backend infrastructure changes. Walk me through your investigation approach.

30.Uber Freight needs to calculate optimal truck routes for 100,000 shipments daily, but our current routing service times out during peak hours when shippers upload bulk orders. The algorithm works fine, but the infrastructure can't handle the computational load. How would you scale this?