Software Engineer interview
at Uber.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 Tell me about a time you took ownership of a production incident that wasn't strictly your responsibility and saw it through to resolution.
2. 02 Describe a time you shipped a bold technical change quickly and how you balanced speed against reliability for users.
3. 03 Give an example of when you valued an idea over hierarchy and pushed back on a design decision from a senior engineer.
4. 04 Tell me about a time you had to persevere through an ambiguous, poorly-scoped project to deliver something customers relied on.

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 Given a city modeled as a weighted graph of road segments, find the shortest path between two points and explain why you'd pick Dijkstra over BFS.
2. 02 Design and implement a thread-safe rate limiter that a dispatch service could use to throttle concurrent ride requests.
3. 03 Implement a data structure that returns the K nearest available drivers to a given coordinate as drivers continuously move.
4. 04 Given a stream of trip events, implement logic to detect duplicate or out-of-order events and reconcile them correctly.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design Uber's driver-rider matching and dispatch system that pairs requests to nearby drivers in real time at city scale.
2. 02 Design Uber's geospatial index for finding nearby available drivers, discussing H3, geohashing, or quadtrees and the 9-cell neighbor search.
3. 03 Design Uber's surge pricing system that computes and propagates dynamic prices per geographic cell under rapidly changing supply and demand.
4. 04 Design a real-time driver location ingestion pipeline that handles millions of GPS updates per second with geo-partitioning and graceful degradation.