← Interview experiences
Got the offer

SSE L5 at Uber

Difficulty
Process took
3-4 Weeks
Rounds
5
Format
Remote
Applied via
Company Website

How it went

  • Do not overstretch your prep timeline, revision is key.
  • Hard work + consistent momentum beats last-minute cramming.

What they would tell you

  • Do not overstretch your prep timeline, revision is key.
  • Hard work + consistent momentum beats last-minute cramming.

How to prepare

DSA:

  • Practice a wide range of graph, DP, and array problems. System Design:

  • Break down into FRs, NFRs, API design, data pipelines.

  • Use tools like Kafka, Flink, Redis, and SQL databases.

Their background

Years of Experience- 7 years 8 months Current Company- MAANG Bangalore location Current Compensation- 75 LPA

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.

  2. 2

    Coding round 260 min

  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

MediumRemote5+ years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources