Design an Uber feature and analyze safety
Company: Uber
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Onsite
You are interviewing for a Data Scientist summer internship at a ride-sharing marketplace.
Part A: Product case
Uber wants ideas for a new rider-facing or driver-facing feature, or a major improvement to an existing workflow, that would make the app meaningfully better. Pick one idea and explain:
- the target user and pain point;
- how the feature is expected to change user behavior;
- the north-star metric, primary success metric, and guardrail metrics;
- tradeoffs across rider experience, driver experience, safety, reliability, and revenue;
- how you would test the feature, including the randomization unit, experiment duration, power or MDE considerations, and how you would handle marketplace interference or spillovers.
Part B: Safety trend analysis
Assume the monthly accident rate for one city is defined as accidents per 100,000 completed trips. A line chart shows that the accident rate increases sharply from June through November and then drops quickly after November. Describe how you would analyze this pattern. Be explicit about:
- validating the metric definition and its numerator and denominator;
- plausible hypotheses for the increase and subsequent decline;
- what internal data cuts and external data you would investigate;
- how to distinguish a true safety change from a reporting or measurement artifact;
- what statistical or causal methods you would use and what follow-up actions you would recommend.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's product-sense and analytical competencies, including feature ideation, metrics definition and validation, randomized experiment design with marketplace interference considerations, trade-off analysis across rider/driver/safety/revenue dimensions, and time-series and causal inference methods for safety trends in a ride-sharing marketplace. Commonly asked in analytics & experimentation interviews, it assesses both conceptual understanding and practical application by testing metric literacy, hypothesis generation, experiment power and randomization choices, and the ability to distinguish true safety changes from reporting or measurement artifacts.