Uber

Uber Software Engineer System Design Questions

41+ questions from real Uber Software Engineer System Design rounds, reported by candidates who interviewed there.

41
Questions
8
Topic Areas
10+
Sources

What does the Uber System Design round test?

The Uber system design round assesses a candidate's ability to architect scalable systems. Software Engineer candidates are typically asked to design a large-scale service or platform from scratch, covering database choices, API design, scaling strategy, and failure modes.

Top Topics in This Round

Uber Software Engineer System Design Questions

Uber Interview Question

Dynamic Programming 2022

Problem name K-step sequence Problem statement Given an array A containing N numbers that are indexed from 1 to N. You are also given Q queries Each query can be described as follows: L R...

Uber HLD

Design 2024

Recently i attended Uber HLD round and below is the problem interviewer pasted, can anyone help Design product browsing experience of user, so suppose there are multiple categories(TV, Machine etc)...

Uber Experience | L4 | SDE-2

Interview Experience 2022

Hey wanted to share my recent Uber interview experience - 1st Coding round 1.) Almost similar to - https://leetcode.com/problems/my-calendar-i/ (Machine coding round) 2.) Bus Routes(https://leetcode.com/problems/bus-routes/) - (Data Structure and algorithms) 3.)...

Uber SDE 2 Fullstack Interview: Course Schedule II and Connect Four LLD

Graph,System Design,Lld,Behavioral,Topological Sort 2026

**How did I apply** : I had applied multiple times via referrals but never got shortlisted. Then, one fine day, the role showed up on LinkedIn. I applied directly and received an email from the recrui

Uber L5 System Design Interview Experience: Designing Kafka Message Broker

System Design,Distributed Systems,Kafka,Concurrency 2026

Recently went through a system design round at Uber where the prompt was: "Design a distributed message broker similar to Apache Kafka." The requirements focused on topic-based pub/sub, partitioned or

Uber L4 Interview Experience: DSA, LLD, and Driver HeatMap HLD

Union Find,Strings,System Design,Lld,Hld 2026

Round 1 (DSA): Disjoint Set Union based question Round 2 (DSA): Number/string manipulation — focused on palindrome logic and edge cases. Round 3 (System Design, LLD): Classic design question around tr

**Question**: Design a custom **ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor** or **ScheduledExecutorService** from scratch – a classic concurrency problem asked by Uber, GS, and Rubrik to test senior engineering skil

Uber SDE I Interview Experience Technical Assessment and LLD

Union Find,Graph,Dsa,Lld,Oop,Strings,System Design 2026

Uber Interview Experience The interview process consisted of **three rounds**: 1. Elimination Round – Technical Assessment 2. Coding Round – Data Structures & Algorithms 3. Low-Level Design Round --

Uber SDE2 Interview Experience Nov 2025: DSA, LLD, HLD and Offer

Dynamic Programming,Graph,System Design,Lld,Behavioral,Dsa,Binary Tree 2026

Round 1: Screening (DSA + System Design) DSA Topic: Dynamic Programming on Trees. Problem: A variation of the Optimal Binary Search Tree problem. Experience: This was my toughest round. Time managemen

Uber Software Engineer Interview: Algorithms and LLD Focus

Graph,Heap,Queue,Union Find,Concurrency,Lld,Dsa 2026

Online Hackerrank Test Two question one based on Graph and one based on Graph. The Graph question was related to Disjoint set Union Was able to pass all the test cases successfully # Business Phone

Recently gave interviews for Senior SDE for Uber. Completed 5 rounds : 1. BPS : Hard level coding question. Went really well. This was a filter round meaning I could not pass onto other rounds if I di

Uber | System Design Round | L5

System Design,Distributed Systems,Kafka,Concurrency 2026

Recently went through a system design round at Uber where the prompt was: "Design a distributed message broker similar to Apache Kafka." The requirements focused on topic-based pub/sub, partitioned or

System Design Interview Experience for Ride Sharing Platform (Uber/Lyft)

System Design,Databases,Scalability,Queue,Hash Table,Heap,Concurrency 2025

**Functional Requirements** * **Ride Management:** Riders request rides via pickup/destination; Drivers accept or decline requests. * **Estimates:** System provides fare estimates and ETA before confi

Uber System Design Interview Experience – Chat Application Design

System Design,Databases,Networking,Scalability 2025

**System Design Objective** Design a scalable instant messaging system comparable to Facebook Messenger that supports real-time communication. The design must address the following core functional req

4 Most Common Design Patterns for Low Level Design Interviews

System Design,Oop,Lld,Design Patterns 2025

The 4 most common design patterns used in LLD interviews are: **Strategy** pattern, **Observer** pattern, **Factory** pattern and **Singleton** Pattern. If you ask, which is the most common or most po

Zepto SE3 LLDRound1(InterviewVector)

Interview-Experience 2024

You are tasked with designing the backend for a ride-booking service similar to Uber or Lyft. The service should allow users to request rides, drivers to accept ride requests, and...

Zepto LLD SDE-II

Interview-Experience 2024

I recently interviewed with zepto, Fist Round : 2 Questions 1 Hard, 1 Medium 2nd Round : This was suppose to be a LLD round Question was to Design DB schema...

Design a system in which user is subscribing to some stocks from list of stocks. User will set some rules on basis of which if the rules are broken we...

OKTA Staff software engineer India

Interview-Experience 2024

1st round: Screening round taken by a Staff engineer, General questions on frameworks, miroservice architecture and infra realted etc 2nd round: Tech round with kubernetes and docker related commands and internals. Also complex...

Given billions of text messages and a list of keywords. design the index for the messages in order to efficiently retrieve messages that contain given keywords. Suppose each message can...

What to Expect in the Uber System Design Round

The Uber Software Engineer System Design round has a specific calibration purpose distinct from other rounds in the loop. Across 41+ verified reports on LeakCode for this exact round type, the consistent expectations: clear scoping of the problem before diving into a solution, explicit reasoning about complexity, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to discuss trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.

Reports tagged with the System Design round at Uber show recurring patterns in difficulty and topic distribution. The System Design round is typically 45-60 minutes; the interviewer is calibrated against a specific rubric. The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the answer. It is the path: did you clarify, did you verbalize your approach, did you handle edge cases, and did you communicate throughout.

How To Prepare for This Specific Round

Filter the questions below to the most recent reports (past 6-12 months). Questions tagged for this exact round type from this exact company at this exact role level are the highest-signal data available. Older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of the company's pool.

Practice 4-6 representative problems from this set under timed conditions. The goal is not memorization (companies rotate questions); the goal is to internalize the patterns the interviewer typically reaches for and the depth of follow-up to expect. Reports on LeakCode also tag the typical follow-up depth at this round type, which is the discriminating signal between hire and no-hire calibration.

System Design Round Timing and Format

The System Design round at Uber typically runs 45-60 minutes. Use the first 2-3 minutes to clarify requirements; you should never start coding or designing without verifying the input/output format, constraints, and edge cases out loud. Use the next 5-7 minutes to verbalize your approach before writing any code. The middle 20-30 minutes are implementation. Reserve the final 10 minutes for testing with concrete examples and discussing optimization or trade-offs.

Time budget discipline is one of the most reliable senior-vs-junior discriminators in this round. Strong candidates verbalize where they are in their budget out loud ("I've used about 20 minutes, I have 15 minutes left for testing and one optimization"). This signals engineering maturity to the interviewer and creates positive feedback they can capture in writing.

Common Failure Modes in This Round

Reports tagged "no hire" at Uber Software Engineer System Design commonly cite: coding silently without verbalizing approach, jumping to implementation before clarifying requirements, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input), producing working code that the candidate cannot refactor when asked, and failing to test their solution with concrete examples before declaring done.

The single most predictive failure mode in 2025-2026 reports: not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers at all FAANG companies are explicitly trained to weight this dimension. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's notes.

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