Uber SWE-1 India Hiring – Cleared OA but Ended Up Waitlisted (Which Basically Means Rejected)
Interview Experience
Recently I went through the hiring process for the Software Engineer 1 (SWE-1) role at Uber for the Bangalore, India location and wanted to share my experience. I was shortlisted for the Online Assess
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Recently I went through the hiring process for the Software Engineer 1 (SWE-1) role at Uber for the Bangalore, India location and wanted to share my experience. I was shortlisted for the Online Assessment on 20th February 2026, and the test was scheduled for 24th February 2026. The assessment was conducted on HackerRank and consisted of 3 coding questions, mostly medium to hard level, with 65 minutes to complete them. I managed to solve all three questions and pass all the test cases, finishing with around 3 minutes remaining. However, five days later, I received an email saying that the positions had already been filled, but based on my performance they would keep my profile on a waitlist. From what I’ve observed, in most cases “waitlisted” essentially ends up being a rejection, since candidates rarely get contacted again unless new roles open up. What I find confusing is that even with a referral and clearing the OA, the result was still a waitlist. I also noticed that a similar situation happened during Uber’s August hiring cycle, where several candidates reported the same outcome. If the company only has 1–2 openings I’m not sure why they send the Online Assessment to such a large number of applicants. Candidates spend time preparing and completing the test seriously, so it can feel discouraging when the process ends like this. For those who have successfully moved past the OA stage at Uber or similar companies, do you have any suggestions on how to improve chances of clearing the OA and moving forward in the process? Curious to know if others experienced something similar with Uber’s SWE-1 hiring process recently.
About This Question
This is a candidate experience report from a uber interview for a swe role during the oa round reported in 2026.
It covers the following topics: Career, General Experience .
Difficulty rating: Hard
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This question was reported by a candidate who interviewed at Uber. LeakCode aggregates interview reports from 10+ sources, including 1Point3Acres, Glassdoor, LeetCode Discuss, Blind, Reddit, Indeed, and Nowcoder. Each report is translated where necessary, deduplicated against existing entries, and tagged by company, role, round type, and reporting date.
Use this question as one calibration data point, not a memorization target. Companies typically rotate their question pools every 2-4 months; the exact wording of a 2024 question may differ from what you encounter today. The underlying pattern, difficulty level, and follow-up depth at Uber are the higher-signal extractions to take from this report.
For broader preparation context, the Uber interview process typically includes a recruiter screen, one or two technical phone screens, and a 4-5 round on-site loop covering coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral. Reports tagged on LeakCode show the round-by-round distribution and typical difficulty calibration. To browse questions filtered by round type and seniority, use the company hub linked above.
How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in Uber reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your Uber Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in Uber reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. 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 written notes.