Uber Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Describe a time when you had to ship a feature or fix quickly under pressure. How did you balance speed with quality and safety?

2.Tell me about a time when you had to convince your team to take a shortcut or move faster on something. What was the situation and how did you ensure it was the right call?

3.Tell me about a time you built or designed a system that had to handle massive scale or global distribution. What were the specific scalability challenges you faced?

4.Walk me through a time when you used data or experimentation to make a significant technical or product decision. What data did you collect and how did it change your approach?

5.Tell me about a time when requirements or priorities changed significantly midway through a project. How did you adapt your technical approach?

6.Describe a system you worked on that needed to handle real-time data processing or low-latency requirements. What were the specific performance constraints and how did you meet them?

7.Write a function that takes a list of driver locations and a rider pickup point, then returns the optimal driver assignment considering both distance and estimated arrival time.

8.Implement a rate limiter that can throttle API requests per user across multiple service instances. The limiter should allow burst traffic but prevent sustained abuse.

9.Our driver matching algorithm needs to assign the closest available driver to a ride request, but we're seeing some drivers getting overloaded while others sit idle. Walk me through how you'd debug this and what data you'd need to investigate.

10.You need to implement a feature flag system that can handle real-time updates for experiments across Uber's microservices. How would you ensure flag changes propagate quickly without overwhelming the system?

11.You're implementing dynamic pricing for Uber rides and need to update fare estimates in real-time as demand changes. How would you design a system that can handle millions of pricing calculations per minute while keeping estimates consistent for users who are actively booking?

12.You're tasked with building a restaurant menu service for Uber Eats that needs to handle menu updates from 500K+ restaurants while serving read requests with sub-100ms latency. How would you approach the caching and data consistency challenges?

13.Design the trip state management system that tracks a ride from request to completion across Uber Rides. The system needs to handle millions of concurrent trips and ensure riders and drivers always see consistent state even during network partitions.

14.Design the driver onboarding and verification system for a new city launch where Uber needs to background check, approve, and activate thousands of drivers within 2-3 weeks. The system must integrate with local regulatory databases and handle document verification at scale.

15.Our Uber Eats delivery tracking system needs to provide real-time location updates to customers while protecting driver privacy. Design a system that can handle location updates from 100K active drivers while giving customers accurate ETAs without exposing exact driver locations.

16.Design the marketplace matching engine for Uber Freight that connects shippers with carriers for long-haul trucking. The system needs to optimize for factors like route efficiency, carrier capacity, and pricing while handling thousands of load postings per minute.

17.Build the surge pricing calculation service for Uber Rides that needs to analyze supply-demand patterns in real-time across thousands of city zones. The system must handle spikes during events or emergencies while ensuring price changes feel fair to riders.

18.Design the global configuration service that manages feature flags, experiment parameters, and safety switches across all of Uber's microservices. The system needs 99.99% availability even when its own dependencies fail, since it controls critical safety features like surge pricing limits and driver background check requirements.

19.Tell me about a time you had to influence engineers from other teams to adopt a change you believed was necessary. How did you approach it when they initially resisted?

20.Describe a time when you were working on something that required you to learn about parts of the business or user experience that were outside your normal scope. How did you approach gaining that context?

21.Describe a situation where you noticed a safety or reliability issue that others were willing to ignore or postpone. How did you handle it?

22.Tell me about a time when you had to choose between shipping a feature that customers were requesting and technical debt that was slowing your team down. How did you make that decision?

23.Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision with incomplete information under a tight deadline. Walk me through your thought process and how you minimized risk.

24.Describe a time when you identified an opportunity to significantly improve something for users, but it would require convincing multiple teams to change their approach. How did you drive that initiative?

25.Uber Eats shows 25-30 minute delivery estimates, but customers are consistently receiving orders 10 minutes late during dinner rush. Walk me through how you'd investigate what's causing this and prioritize fixes.

26.Estimate how many active drivers Uber needs in Manhattan during Friday evening rush hour to maintain average pickup times under 4 minutes. Walk through your assumptions.

27.Our Uber Freight platform launched in a new region but load acceptance rates are only 30% compared to 65% in mature markets. How would you diagnose why carriers aren't accepting loads and what experiments would you run?

28.Uber wants to launch a subscription service where riders pay $20/month for reduced wait times and priority matching. How would you estimate the revenue impact and what trade-offs would you analyze before launch?

29.Uber is considering adding package delivery during off-peak ride hours where drivers can pick up and deliver packages between passenger trips. Estimate the incremental revenue opportunity and what operational challenges you'd need to solve.

30.Uber's autonomous vehicle program needs to decide between deploying self-driving cars in Phoenix suburbs versus downtown San Francisco. Both have regulatory approval. How would you structure the decision and what data would drive your recommendation?