← Uber Interview Insights

Uber·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture·Senior

Senior
Jun 2026

Summary

Interviewed for a security engineer role at Uber and got a system design question about building a malware scanner reporting dashboard. Pretty focused session, one meaty design problem and a lot of back-and-forth on the details.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Design a malware scanner reporting dashboard.

System DesignTechnical Trade-offsProduct Sense & Ideation
Author's notes

Spent the first few minutes just trying to scope it out because 'reporting dashboard' could mean a dozen different things.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying the requirements and scope of the malware scanner reporting dashboard, focusing on the key users (security engineers, incident responders) and their needs. Then outline a high-level architecture covering data ingestion, processing, storage, and visualization, while discussing trade-offs and scalability. Finally, dive into specific components like real-time alerting, data retention, and query performance, ensuring alignment with Uber's scale and security constraints.

Pro tip: Emphasize the importance of designing for both real-time and historical analysis, and discuss how you would handle data volume and velocity given Uber's massive scale. Also, highlight security and privacy considerations, such as access control and data anonymization, to demonstrate a mature understanding of the domain.

1. Clarify Requirements

Ask questions to understand the dashboard's purpose, target users, key metrics, data sources, and non-functional requirements like latency, throughput, and retention.

2. High-Level Architecture

Sketch the end-to-end system: data collection from scanners, ingestion pipeline, processing (e.g., aggregation, enrichment), storage (e.g., time-series DB, data lake), and visualization layer.

3. Deep Dive into Components

Discuss critical components in detail: real-time alerting, query engine, data partitioning, and how to ensure scalability and fault tolerance.

4. Trade-offs and Scalability

Analyze trade-offs between consistency and availability, batch vs. stream processing, and cost vs. performance. Explain how the design scales with Uber's data volume.

5. Security and Monitoring

Address security (access control, encryption) and monitoring of the dashboard itself (e.g., health checks, alerting on failures).

Key Points to Mention

  • Data ingestion from multiple malware scanners (e.g., ClamAV, YARA) with varying formats and rates.
  • Real-time vs. batch processing: use stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink) for alerts and batch for historical reporting.
  • Storage choices: time-series database for metrics, data lake for raw scan results, and indexing for fast queries.
  • Scalability: partitioning by time and scanner type, using distributed systems like Cassandra or BigQuery.
  • Visualization: customizable dashboards with drill-down capabilities, using tools like Grafana or Kibana.
  • Security: role-based access control, data encryption, and audit logging to protect sensitive scan data.

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.