Uber

Role: SDE-1

College: IIT Madras (MTech grad from Tier-1 college)

Interview Date: 2022-12-01

Interview Type: On-Campus

Result: Not Specified

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 3 rounds (Technical Round, Low-Level System Design, HR)

Topics Asked: Problem Solving, Data Structures (Dynamic Programming, Graphs), Object-Oriented Programming, Low-Level System Design

Experience:

The candidate, an MTech grad from IIT Madras, received an on-campus opportunity for SDE-1 at Uber. After a CodeSignal online assessment, 10 people were shortlisted.

Round 1 (Technical Round): The interviewer made the candidate comfortable. The round started with a 5-minute introduction, followed by 20-25 minutes for question discussion, 10 minutes for coding, and 5 minutes for candidate questions. The question involved 'n' queues, each with some elements, and the task was to find 'k' elements from these 'n' queues such that their sum is maximum, with queues only popping from the front. The candidate used a DP approach, and with some hints, reached the final solution and coded it. The interviewer was supportive and helpful.

Round 2 (Low-Level System Design): The interviewer presented a problem where the candidate needed to implement append, undo, and redo operations. The candidate proposed an O(1) time complexity approach with space complexity proportional to the count of append operations. The interviewer asked to implement this using a Doubly Linked List, which the candidate did, and it passed test cases. Discussion around optimizing space by setting a cap on undo/redo operations also took place.

Round 3 (HR): Details not explicitly provided in the snippet, but it was the final round after the technical and design rounds.

Overall, the candidate suggested that the first round tests problem-solving, and the second tests coding skills and object-oriented principles. Uber often asks questions from Dynamic Programming and Graph topics.