My Uber Interview Experience — Cracking the SSE(L5A) Role 🚀

Hello everyone! How’s life treating you? Hope all is well! I’m thrilled to share that I successfully cracked the Uber interview! 🎉 This happened back in August 2024, but I’m posting about it a bit late due to a busy schedule. It was a long, intense, multi-round process, but I learned a lot from it. Here’s a detailed breakdown of my journey, I hope this will help you if you all preparing for interviews :

🛤️ The Interview Process — 5 Rounds

Screening Round (Coding)— Next Largest Palindrome

This was the first round of the interview process and an elimination round. The interviewer was chill and helpful and it started with a brief introduction, then he gave a leetcode hard question 🥲. I had to write code to find the next closest largest palindrome of a given number. Initially, I thought the problem was simple and so was trying to solve it. But discussing with the interviewer I realized that it was not very straightforward. I broke the problem into multiple subproblems/cases with a little help from the interviewer. However, I was not confident if my solution would pass all test cases or not.

Finally, after 1hour I was able to solve the problem and able to provide workable code, with at least some test cases passing. The Interviewer's reaction was neutral and I was not happy with my performance and was expecting rejection in this round only.

But things changed, I was given the benefit of the doubt, and was moved to the next round 🎉.

Coding Round 1 (Problem-Solving)— Paint House Problem + Follow-up

This was the first round after the screening round. I was given to Solve the Paint House problem, a classic dynamic programming (DP) problem, with some follow-up questions. I had solved a similar kind of problem previously so was able to implement the initial solution smoothly. In the follow-up, the interviewer added some more constraints and asked me to optimize the solution further and explain possible trade-offs. Overall I was able to solve and provide the working solution in the given time. And the interviewer was also happy with my solutions. In last, we also discussed the time and space complexity and thread safety of the problem.

Coding Round 2 (LLD) — Order Booking System

It was mostly focused on the LLD questions, I was asked to design the low-level architecture of an Order Booking System similar to Swiggy. This round focused on object-oriented design principles, proper class structures, and inter-class relationships. I ensured my design was modular and scalable, keeping edge cases in mind. The interviewer gave me some features/constraints that I need to implement in the solution within the given time. In the beginning, I was confident but I made a mistake, I focused on trying to make the code more production quality, so added a lot of things unnecessary code which took time. In the last 10 minutes, I was not able to properly solve all the required cases in the given time. But somehow managed to show some working code in the last 2–3 minutes. The interviewer was neutral and I was not happy with my performance as I could do much better.

But after 1–2 days, Recruitor called me and shared the feedback and say we can move to next phrase of interviews. And told me that i need strong hire in all remaining ones🎉.

Round 3 — Design /HLD Round — Order and Account Management System

This was one of the toughest rounds of the process, but I'm glad I did well in this round. The interviewer was senior and experienced, and he was a Staff Engineer at Uber. I was given a to design a scalable accounting system that ingests and does accounting of financial events/orders for Uber at scale. The interviewer was interested in how I would handle scaling, data consistency, availability, idempotency, etc. I was able to design a good system in a given time and call out all the relevant trade-offs I took while designing the system. The interview lasted for more than 1 hour and 15 minutes and I was happy with my performance since I was able to answer every question I asked.

Post this interview i got call from recruitor about the postive feedback and told that we moving to final HM round 🎉.

Round 4 Hiring Manager (HM) Round — Project Design + Leadership

This was the final round of the interview process and lasted for more than 1.5 hours. The interview started with my introduction followed by my current project, work, and role. This round was with the HM exploring how I approach collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership and my current role. I designed/discussed the HLD of a project of my last company and gave in-depth insights and tradeoffs it took. He asked a couple of follow-up questions on that design and I answered all of them.

We ended the session with a discussion about the team, its projects, and the role’s expectations. It was an engaging and positive conversation.

Then I got a call from a recruiter about the positive feedback. It was an exhilarating journey, and cracking the Uber interview felt like an achievement! 🚀

Enjoyed the article? Follow me on X.com for more interesting content, and check out my website at anuraggoel.in !😊

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