Uber·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
- Given the root of a binary search tree and an integer k, return the kth smallest value in the tree (1-indexed).
“In-order traversal gives you a sorted sequence, so I just did that and counted up to k.”
Large Enterprises
Most of these Uber write-ups come from Software Engineers (407), then Data Scientists (78) and Machine Learning Engineers (65). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (387), the system design round (95), the product sense round (46) and the onsite coding round (23).
609 interview notes · updated Aug 2026
“In-order traversal gives you a sorted sequence, so I just did that and counted up to k.”
“This part felt manageable.”
“Took me a minute to see past the physics-y framing.”
“I went straight to acquisition channels and the interviewer kind of just waited.”
“The historical framing threw me a little because you already know how things played out, so there's this weird temptation to just reverse-engineer the 'right' answer.”
“The core insight took me longer than i'd like to admit: if you track where each value sits in the array, then 1..k forms a contiguous block if and only if the spread of those positions (max minus min plus one) equals k.”
“This one had layers.”
“The DFS part clicked pretty fast.”
“My first instinct was greedy, which went nowhere fast.”
“This is the whole round basically.”