Prepare for your Uber Staff engineer interview

Distributed systems, marketplace infrastructure, and global scale rounds calibrated to Uber Staff+ expectations on chaos resilience and real-time operational optimization.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Uber is looking for

Architecture Interview

Marketplace & Real-Time Systems

01Real-Time Matching & Dispatch Algorithms

02Geospatial Indexing & Routing

03Supply-Demand Balancing & Surge

04Global Expansion & Localization Strategy

System Design Interview

Distributed Resilience & Coordination

01Handling Network Partition & Byzantine Failures

02Eventual Consistency & Conflict Resolution

03High-Throughput Event Processing

04Multi-Datacenter Orchestration

Leadership Interview

Technical Leadership Under Chaos

01Making Trade-offs Under Uncertainty

02Cross-Regional Coordination & Ownership

03Building Resilient Teams & Practices

04Scaling Technical Decision-Making

Real-time marketplace matching and demand prediction at scale//Operational resilience under chaotic conditions and geographic distribution//Cross-functional technical leadership across product and infrastructure

Practice Library

Uber exercises

Ready to ace your Uber Staff engineer interview?

Prepare for your Uber Staff engineer interview

Distributed systems, marketplace infrastructure, and global scale rounds calibrated to Uber Staff+ expectations on chaos resilience and real-time operational optimization.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Uber is looking for

Architecture Interview

Marketplace & Real-Time Systems

01Real-Time Matching & Dispatch Algorithms

02Geospatial Indexing & Routing

03Supply-Demand Balancing & Surge

04Global Expansion & Localization Strategy

System Design Interview

Distributed Resilience & Coordination

01Handling Network Partition & Byzantine Failures

02Eventual Consistency & Conflict Resolution

03High-Throughput Event Processing

04Multi-Datacenter Orchestration

Leadership Interview

Technical Leadership Under Chaos

01Making Trade-offs Under Uncertainty

02Cross-Regional Coordination & Ownership

03Building Resilient Teams & Practices

04Scaling Technical Decision-Making

How It Works

Master Uber Staff Engineer Interviews

Architecture, system design, and leadership rounds scored on distributed systems mastery and operational excellence at global scale. · Click to expand

1Your Staff Engineer Goals

Distributed Systems Architecture

Practitioner

Systems Scaling & Evolution

Practitioner

2Staff Engineer Case Prep

Design Uber real-time matching for 100M drivers and 500M riders globally. How do you...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Uber

3Frameworks

Framework

Are query patterns causing excessive compute?

Are sequential lookups and N+1 queries present?

Slow query log: 22% of queries are N+1 with avg 15 sub-queries per parent

Eliminating N+1 with batch loading reduces DB CPU from 68% to 41%

Is denormalization opportunity being missed?

User engagement aggregate refreshed hourly via 12 JOINs: 18% of read traffic

Materialized view with hourly refresh: 8% cost of current JOINs

Is the replication strategy suboptimal?

Is synchronous replication creating write bottleneck?

Writes replicate to 3 regions synchronously: p99 write latency 840ms

Async replication with consistency quorum: p99 latency 85ms, same durability

Are read replicas over-provisioned?

12 read replicas, but 8 carry <5% of read traffic

Consolidating cold replicas to on-demand snapshots saves 60% of replica costs

Is the data model creating unnecessary hot paths?

Are wide columns forcing full row scans?

Profile column holds 4MB of JSON, accessed in <1% of queries

Moving blob to separate table reduces primary key cache footprint by 31%

Are leaderboard / global counters creating lock contention?

Single global counters table: 47% of database lock wait time

4Feedback

Architecture Reasoning

Distinctive

Scaling Decisions

Distinctive

Technical Trade-offs

Strong

Organizational Impact

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Uber exercises

Design Uber's real-time matching system for 100M drivers and 500M riders globally. How...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Mobility / Marketplace · Real-Time Matching at ScaleUber

Walk me through a network partition scenario: two data centers lose connectivity. How do...

LEARNHard

Technology · Partition Tolerance & CAPUber

Design the architecture for expanding Uber to 50 new countries in 18 months. How do you...

LEARNHard

Mobility · Global Scale & LocalizationUber

Tell me about a time you made a significant architectural decision under incomplete...

BEHAVIORALHard

Behavioral · Decision-Making Under UncertaintyUber

Describe a situation where you had to coordinate across multiple engineering teams on a...

BEHAVIORALHard

Behavioral · Cross-Team CoordinationUber