SSE L5 at Uber

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Coding Round 160 min

   In my first round, I was asked to find the minimum cost to travel in a grid where moving in the arrow’s direction is free and any other move costs 1. I started with brute-force DFS, discussed its high complexity with the interviewer, briefly considered DP, and then moved to a graph-based approach. I modeled the grid as a weighted graph with 0/1 edges and used Dijkstra’s algorithm to solve it.

   • Minimum Cost to travel in a Grid
2. 2

   Coding round 260 min

   • Find the largest palindrome Divisible by K
3. 3

   Machine Coding Round60 min

   I had to implement expiry counter, basically a class with methods to add elements and fetch counts, but with each element expiring after t seconds. I first went with a priority queue + hashmap idea to manage expirations, but the interviewer didn’t seem too satisfied. Then I suggested a simpler binary search approach, just keep a mapping of each element to its list of timestamps and use bisect to quickly find valid ones.

4. 4

   System Design Round60 min

   In my system design round (taken by a Senior Engineer), I was asked to design a real-time surge pricing system that shows surge multipliers for city regions. The problem had two parts, a near real-time use case (updates every 1–2 minutes for the last 20 mins) and an analytics use case (hourly aggregates after 24 hours). I proposed consuming ride/driver events via Kafka, using geohashing to bucket regions, and processing streams with Flink. For real-time results, I suggested writing aggregates to Redis for fast lookups, while for analytics, hourly rollups would be stored in Postgres. We also discussed scalability, fault tolerance, and fallback strategies.

5. 5

   Managerial Round60 min

   • Started with questions about my current and past company projects.
   • Asked me to use a virtual whiteboard to explain a impactful project I had led.
   • Wanted details of all challenges (technical + non-technical).
   • He then described the role, product vision, and upcoming AI use cases.
   • Asked why I wanted to leave my current role and what I was looking for.

What came up