Design a ride-sharing system (Uber)
Company: Oracle
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a large-scale ride-sharing platform similar to Uber.
Cover:
- Rider and driver apps (account, availability, requesting rides).
- Real-time driver location updates and rider tracking.
- Matching/dispatch (find and assign drivers).
- Trip lifecycle (request → accept → pickup → dropoff → payment).
- Scale, reliability, and latency targets.
- Data storage choices and geospatial indexing.
- Handling surge pricing, cancellations, and fraud/abuse signals.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates skills in large-scale distributed system architecture, real-time geospatial data handling, matching and dispatch logic, stateful trip lifecycle management, and operational concerns such as scalability, reliability, latency, pricing dynamics, and fraud detection.