YOUR BRIEF
What to work through
Work through uber as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- A rider enters pickup and destination and gets a fare estimate
- A rider requests a ride at that fare
- The rider is matched with a nearby available driver
- A driver accepts or declines, then navigates to pickup and drop-off
BEFORE YOU START
Constraints to discuss
- A match in under 1 minute, or a clear failure
- A driver is never assigned two rides at once
- Handles 100,000 requests from one place at peak
- Takes about 2 million driver location updates a second
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- The user id or the fare in the request body instead of the token and the stored fare
- Writing every location update to the main database
- In-memory timers for the accept window
- Ignoring the client, which can send fewer updates when the driver is idle
- Scaling vertically instead of sharding by region
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.
- Amazon: Third on Hello Interview’s list of most common SDE II design questions.
- Meta: Hello Interview’s guide to Meta’s two design tracks names "Design Uber" as an example Product Architecture question.
- Uber: PracHub lists Uber reports of "Design a Ride-Sharing System" (June 2026) and "Design a Real-Time Nearby-Driver Service" (August 2026).