Uber SDE-1 2025 || Interview Experience || Pending Status

🛣️ My Uber SDE-1 Interview Experience 🚗

I recently interviewed for the SDE-1 role at Uber and wanted to share my experience to help others who might be preparing. Here’s a breakdown of the process:

🔄 Total Rounds: 4

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📌 Round 1: Technical Coding (DSA Elimination Round)

• Got two problems:
  1. A medium-hard graph problem, requiring a DFS/BFS-based approach.
  2. A conceptual discussion around the classic Edit Distance problem.
• I was able to solve both efficiently and optimally.
• The interviewer seemed satisfied with my approach and clarity of explanation.
• I think , I will get hire/strong hire from this round.

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📌 Round 2: Problem Solving with a Twist (Uber Story Style)

• The question was framed in an Uber real-world scenario.There is a city connected to each other , where we want to put maximum number of Uber cabs to reach each and every location fast.
• Simplified the problem , I had to find all nodes from which the maximum distance to other nodes is minimized.
• It was a blend of graph algorithms and topological sorting.
• Take all the leaf Nodes and run toposort from all leaf Nodes and you will get the centre of the graph.
• Took a bit of time but was able to arrive at a correct and optimized solution.
• I think , I will get hire/lean hire as I was not that quick in this round , took a lot of time to understand the problem but solved correctly in the most optimized way.

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📌 Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD)

• This round didn’t go as well.
• The task was to implement a design problem with appropriate classes, methods, and logic.
• There is a company , who has employees and a referal bonus system , where one employee will get some bonus for referring another one.
• I had to implement it from the scratch and interviewer wanted to query on the employee or the company.
• I misunderstood some part of the requirement and implemented the logic incorrectly.
• Tried to correct it mid-way, but ran out of time to fully recover.
• As I communicated properly and wrote clean code with proper structure , hoping for atleast lean Hire :)

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📌 Round 4: Hiring Manager (HM) Round

• Focused more on behavioral questions, past projects, and team fit.
• Discussed decision-making, ownership, challenges I’ve faced, and how I handled them.
• Overall, it was a calm and friendly discussion.
• Expecting a hire from here.

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🎯 Takeaways:

• Be strong with graph algorithms (especially BFS/DFS and shortest-path problems).
• Expect real-world story-based questions that map to classic CS problems.
• For LLD, practice clarifying requirements before coding, and rehearse end-to-end implementations :).

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Still waiting on the final decision, but I hope this helps someone preparing for similar roles. Feel free to connect or ask if you have questions — happy to help!