Uber Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Recruiter Outreach and a Pre-Drawn Architecture Diagram

A recruiter contacted me first, and I figured I'd give it a shot, since Uber had been sitting on my target list for quite a while.

Coding:
Ahead of the phone screen and the coding onsite rounds, I put most of my prep time into LeetCode problems that were tagged with the company.

Python is my pick for coding interviews. The syntax is compact enough that I get time to finish the main problem and any follow-ups. I'd tell anyone to get comfortable with a scripting language like Python for this, because it is far less wordy than Java or C++. You only get 60 minutes to explain your approach and write it out, and that disappears quickly.

System Design (new system):
To prepare for this one, I went through every problem walkthrough in an online system design course I was using. I also skimmed the write-ups on the underlying technologies, things like Kafka and Zookeeper. You do not need to know their internals, only enough to defend why you picked them. They are worth reading, particularly if you come from Big Tech, where you are used to in-house tools rather than their open source equivalents.

System Design (solved problem):
Before the interview I drew an architecture diagram in Excalidraw of a system I had built at my last job, and I kept that tab shared with the interviewer for the whole session. I began with the requirements, including some of the trade-off conversations I had had with PMs, then moved on to the design trade-offs, and finally walked through the end design on the diagram. Because of this order, many of the interviewer's questions got answered before he asked them, and he even said so. Nice!

Behavioral interview:
At senior level and above, have solid stories about working across functions and resolving conflicts. I told them about a time I got two teams with competing priorities to agree, which let us ship a high-impact project. Delivery matters, but they also want to hear about the obstacles you got past along the way. It also helps to have one or two examples of mistakes you learned from, where you took feedback and closed the gap.

Good luck!