Uber Freight SWE3 Interview Experience

My Uber Freight SWE3 interview process was quite structured. Each round focused on a different engineering skill

starting with DSA,

moving into low-level design,

and finally ending with a system-design round.

Experience: More than 4.5 years

Round-by-Round Experience

DSA

I was given an interesting grouping problem involving N riders in a car.

Each rider i was comfortable with a group only when the number of other riders was between L[i] and H[i]. I had to find the maximum number of riders that could be selected while satisfying everyone's condition.

The interviewer expected an O(N) solution, so after discussing the approach, I also had to justify why the complexity stayed linear.

Low-Level Design

The next task was to design a basic file system supporting operations like:

• mkdir - create a directory

• ls - list files and directories

• touch - create a file

• cd - move between directories

• pwd - return the current path

• rm - delete a file or directoryI identified the main entities and explained the directory hierarchy, parent-child relationships and class structure.

There was no requirement to write complete working code, so most of the discussion focused on whether the design was clean and extensible.

System Design

The final prompt was Design a distributed URL shortener.

I started by clarifying the requirements and defining the APIs for creating and redirecting short URLs.

From there, the discussion moved into short-code generation, database choices, caching, collisions, expiration and sharding. The interviewer also asked how I would maintain scalability and availability as traffic increased.

Final Update

All three rounds were done from my side. Overall, I felt the interviews went reasonably well, although there were definitely a few follow-ups where I could have explained my approach better.

I haven't received the final result yet, so I'm still waiting for an update from the team. Will update the post once I hear back.