Uber Software Engineer Interview Experience — Meeting Scheduler Follow-ups, Paxos/Raft BQ, and a Driver HeatMap System Design

Technical Screen:

The interviewer tested an algorithm problem (the name was written in an obscured/garbled way in the original post), with a follow-up asking for a simple multithreading variation.

Virtual Onsite:

Algorithm round: one of the interviewers tested something pretty similar to the earlier problem, with a follow-up about not passing time in as an argument.

BQ round, with the hiring manager: I thought I'd need to draw a diagram but actually didn't. I ended up wasting some time drawing on my own initiative this round, and I didn't explain Paxos and Raft very clearly either, so my performance was just so-so.

Algorithm round: another interviewer tested Design Meeting Scheduler. I finished it too fast, so I got hit with several follow-ups:

• implement binary search without using a library
• getTopK — using a doubly linked list approach
• run MapReduce over the schedule
• rooms have a priority ordering — what factors go into it (how often a room is used, duration), and how do you integrate them

System design round: the system design interviewer tested Driver HeatMap — websocket + cell id, top-K solution.

Two days after I finished, HR told me I passed. Pretty lucky — I'd basically seen all of these before. But let me complain about one thing: the interviewer originally scheduled for my SD round stood me up. I waited half an hour before it was finally canceled. That kind of broke my mental state a bit. It's genuinely not easy to carve out time for interviews...

Job hunting isn't easy. Let's keep pushing together~