Recently, I had the opportunity to interview with Uber for a senior engineering role, and one of the rounds was a deep-dive system design interview.
Prompt: Design a food delivery platform like Uber Eats.
We discussed:
- Real-time matching of users and restaurants
- Order lifecycle management (from placement to delivery)
- Live tracking of delivery agents on a map
- Handling spikes during lunch/dinner hours
- Role of queues, load balancers, and database design
- Notifications, retries, and fallback mechanisms
I emphasized scalability, low latency, and modularity, and it turned into an exciting discussion around trade-offs and real-world challenges.