Uber interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Uber software engineering interview across 4 levels and 15 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
Software Engineer Intern (UberSTAR — Summer / 6-month, campus + off-campus)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4 days · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months
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Round 0: Online Coding Assessment (CodeSignal / HackerRank-Codility)
Assessment · 60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Bus Routes — You are given an array routes where routes[i] is the list of bus stops the i-th bus repeatedly cycles through. You start at bus stop source and want to reach bus stop target, traveling only by bus. Return the fewest number of buses you must take, or -1 if impossible.
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Round 1: Technical Interview 1 - DSA / Coding
Phone · ~45 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: Merge Intervals — Given an array of intervals where intervals[i] = [start_i, end_i], merge all overlapping intervals and return an array of the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the intervals in the input.
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Round 2: Technical Interview 2 - OOP / Low-Level Design
Onsite · ~45 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design a Parking Lot (Low-Level Design) — Design the classes for a parking-lot system: multiple levels, multiple spot sizes (motorcycle / compact / large), vehicle types that map to allowable spots, ticketing on entry, spot assignment, and fee calculation on exit. Focus on clean OOP, extensibility (adding new vehicle/spot types), and thread-safe spot allocation. Implement a small working version in 45-60 minutes.
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Round 3: HR / Hiring Manager Round (Behavioral)
Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Software Engineer II (SDE-2 / L4) — India
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months
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Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen
Phone · ~30 min
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Online Assessment (CodeSignal)
Assessment · ~60-90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Longest Continuous Subarray With Absolute Diff Less Than or Equal to Limit — Given an integer array nums and an integer limit, return the length of the longest non-empty subarray such that the absolute difference between the maximum and minimum element of the subarray is <= limit.
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Round 2: DSA / Problem-solving (live coding)
Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Cheapest Flights Within K Stops — Given n cities and a list of flights [from, to, price], find the cheapest price from src to dst using at most k stops (k+1 edges). Return -1 if no such route exists.
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Round 3: Machine coding / Low-Level Design (concurrency)
System_design · ~60-90 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a distributed logging / log-aggregation system — Design a system that collects logs from thousands of microservices, ingests and buffers them at high throughput, stores them cost-effectively (hot vs cold tiers), and supports near-real-time querying/search for monitoring and debugging. Cover ingestion pipeline, partitioning/retention, and query path.
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Round 4: System Design (HLD)
System_design · ~60-75 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a real-time chat / messaging system (Messenger-style) — Design a 1:1 and group real-time messaging service: message delivery and ordering, online/last-seen presence, delivery/read receipts, fan-out and storage schema. Interviewers evolve requirements mid-round (e.g. add group chat, schema changes) and probe how the data model adapts.
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Round 5: Hiring Manager / Behavioral
Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Senior Software Engineer (L5) — India
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 months
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Round 0: Recruiter / HR screen
Phone · ~30 min
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Coding screen (online editor / CodeSignal)
Assessment · ~30-60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Alien Dictionary — Given a list of words sorted lexicographically by an unknown alien alphabet, derive any valid ordering of the characters. Return the order as a string, or an empty string if no valid ordering exists (cycle, or an invalid prefix relationship).
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Round 2: Onsite loop: DSA + LLD/machine coding + System Design + HM
Onsite · ~60 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design Uber's real-time driver heatmap system — Design a system that ingests continuous driver GPS pings across a city, aggregates them into geospatial cells (e.g. H3 hexagons) in near real time, and serves a live driver-density heatmap to an internal dashboard / drivers. Cover ingestion at scale, geospatial indexing/bucketing, aggregation windows, storage, and the query/serving path.
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Round 3: Bar Raiser (senior loops)
Behavioral · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Staff Software Engineer (L6) — India
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~4-6+ weeks; structure NOT documented in India-specific 2024 · Recommended prep: Heavy on system/architecture design, cro · Cooldown: Not documented.
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Round 0: Staff loop (screen + design-heavy onsite + leadership) — UNVERIFIED for India
Onsite · Not reliably documented for India · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Other companies' interview processes
Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.