Design a ride-sharing system like Uber
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a ride-sharing system.
Requirements:
- Riders request trips with pickup/dropoff.
- Drivers send frequent location updates.
- Match riders to nearby drivers quickly.
- Provide ETA estimates and trip state (requested/assigned/enroute/in-trip/completed).
- Handle peak load and regional outages.
Out of scope: full maps/navigation, dynamic pricing ML.
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's competence in system design, including building scalable, low-latency distributed architectures for real-time location updates, rider-driver matching, trip state management, ETA estimation, and resilience to peak load and regional outages.