Uber Interview Questions — Page 23

Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber SWE interview, coding round focused on a classic merge problem. Nothing too surprising but the follow-up discussion on trade-offs was more involved than I expected.

You have k sorted linked lists. Merge them all into a single sorted linked list. Walk through your approach, the complexity, and any edge cases you'd handle.

“I jumped straight to the min-heap approach because it felt like the 'right' answer and I wanted to signal I knew it.”

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Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber SWE coding round, 60 minutes, two algorithm questions back to back. Nothing too exotic but the second one had enough edge cases to keep me on my toes.

Given an array of daily stock prices, find the maximum profit you can make from a single buy-sell transaction. If no profitable trade exists, return 0.
Given a binary tree, return its vertical order traversal as a list of lists, where nodes are grouped by column, sorted top to bottom within each column, and ties broken by node value ascending.

“Classic question, knew it immediately.”

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Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Two coding problems for an Uber SWE round. The first was a grid traversal thing, the second was a tree path palindrome counter. Both had enough edge cases to keep you honest.

Given a 2D grid with empty cells and obstacles, find all positions where a robot's directional distances to the nearest obstacle in each of the four directions exactly match a given target signature. If any direction has no obstacle before the grid boundary, that position is invalid.
In a rooted tree where each node holds a character, for a given query node count how many path segments starting at that node and ending at any ancestor (including the node itself and the root) can be rearranged into a palindrome.

“The boundary condition tripped me up more than I expected.”

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Uber·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber data science interview that threw a full econometrics case at me. One question, but it had about seven layers to it and I was not prepared for how deep they wanted to go on the causal inference side.

How would you estimate the causal effect of price on ETA (or ETA on price) given that the two are determined simultaneously? Walk through an econometric strategy including instrument selection, a 2SLS spec with fixed effects and clustered errors, exclusion restrictions, elasticity computation, and diagnostic tests. How would the results feed into surge pricing decisions?

“This wrecked me a little.”

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Uber·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Uber and got a coding problem that felt more like a software engineering screen than anything data-related. The question was straightforward on the surface but the in-place constraint is where things get interesting.

Given an integer array, move all zeros to the front while keeping the relative order of the non-zero elements intact. Must be done in-place with constant extra space. What time complexity would you aim for?

“My first instinct was to just iterate from the back and swap, but preserving relative order makes that messy.”

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Uber·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber DS interview, product analytics round focused on a streaming auto-play feature. The question had a lot of moving parts and I don't think I handled the churn vs. watch time tradeoff as cleanly as I should have.

For a streaming platform testing auto-play of the next episode, what primary and guardrail metrics would you track, and how would you design an experiment to measure its impact including unit of randomization and run duration?
If the experiment shows churn rising among power users but total watch time increases across all users, how do you decide whether to launch the feature?

“I went straight to total watch time as the north star and listed a few guardrail metrics like session drop-off rate and support contacts.”

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Uber·Data Scientist·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

Uber DS interview that went deep into real-time dispatch system design for airport pickups. One question, but it was a beast, covering optimization, uncertainty handling, and algorithmic theory all at once. Left feeling like I'd only scratched the surface.

Design an online dispatch algorithm for airport pickups that minimizes passenger wait time and deadhead miles. Your system receives streaming flight ETAs with Gaussian uncertainty and live driver positions. Walk through the objective function, data structures, algorithmic approach, how you handle ETA updates and cancellations, fairness across drivers, complexity analysis, competitive ratio or worst-case bounds, and a fallback strategy for demand spikes.

“This question is basically five questions stapled together and they want you to hold all of it in your head simultaneously.”

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Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber SWE phone screen, pretty standard algorithmic stuff. One question, clean problem statement, but the edge cases and follow-up pushed it further than I expected.

Given a non-negative integer x, return its integer square root (the largest integer n such that n*n <= x). No floating-point output, integers only.

“Jumped straight to binary search which was the right call.”

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Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Uber SWE interview with a tree traversal problem that looked like a standard BFS question until it wasn't. The twist on visibility and directionality took me a minute to even parse correctly.

Given a rooted n-ary tree where each node has an ordered list of children, simulate a traversal that starts at the bottom-left, moves up to the root collecting the leftmost visible node at each depth, then continues downward to the bottom-right collecting the rightmost visible node at each depth. Return these as a single sequence with no duplicates. Analyze time and space complexity, write pseudocode, and handle edge cases like a single node or a heavily skewed tree.

“I spent the first few minutes just trying to understand what 'visible' meant here.”

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Uber·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Uber for a software engineer role. The whole thing was basically one big project deep-dive and they really wanted to peel back every layer of it.

Walk me through a project you led or played a major role in. Cover the goals, how you measured success, your specific responsibilities, the hardest challenges or conflicts you ran into, key decisions you made, how you handled stakeholders, the timeline, and the actual measurable impact. Also, what would you do differently?

“This is a lot of ground to cover in one answer and I definitely underestimated how much they'd push on each piece.”

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