Prioritize rooms for allocation
Company: Uber
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a room allocation service that, given a meeting request (time window, duration, capacity, equipment, location), returns a ranked list of rooms. Propose a scoring function integrating factors such as historical room usage counts, expected idle-time fragmentation, attendee walking distance, equipment match, past no-show rates, and fairness across teams. Describe data sources and freshness, how weights are tuned (rules vs learned model), safeguards against starvation, online/offline evaluation, and an A/B testing plan.
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design a real-time room allocation and ranking service in the System Design domain, testing competencies in architectural design, ranking and scoring functions, data sourcing and freshness, fairness mechanisms, and online evaluation and experimentation.
Read the full Uber Software Engineer interview experience this question came from