Design ride-hailing pricing with fairness and pooling

Q: Design ride-hailing pricing with fairness and pooling

This is a System Design interview question from Amazon for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

System Design: Ride-Hailing Pricing Engine

Context

Design a pricing engine for a ride-hailing platform that maximizes revenue while ensuring fairness to riders and drivers. The system must operate in real time, support experimentation, and provide transparent price breakdowns.

Requirements

API: Given a user trip request, return multiple candidate routes for the rider to choose.
Pricing: Compute a price for each candidate route using distance, duration, demand/supply, waiting time, and driver incentives.
Carpooling: When a rider opts into pooling, compute the rider’s price considering shared segments and detours.
Fairness: Enforce caps on surge multipliers, equitable pricing across neighborhoods, and provide transparent breakdowns.
Experimentation: Allow experimentation with pricing strategies and guardrails for safety.
Real-time updates: Handle live changes in demand and driver availability.

Deliverables

A high-level system design covering components, request/data flows, and storage.
Pseudocode for the core price calculation function with inputs, outputs, and complexity.
Discussion of trade-offs, assumptions, and a plan to validate fairness.

Design ride-hailing pricing with fairness and pooling

System Design: Ride-Hailing Pricing Engine

Context

Requirements

Deliverables

Solution (Locked)

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