Uber Data Engineering Interview Q&A

Practice a proposed design, its critical trade-off, and a concrete way to validate it.

Question bank

39 likely follow-ups grouped by the part of the design an interviewer will challenge.

Interview answer

Design an end-to-end pipeline that processes Uber trip events in real time.

Proposed design

I would define immutable trip lifecycle events first, key them by trip_id in regional Kafka, and use an event-time stream processor to build the current trip state. The same events land unchanged in Bronze; Silver validates and deduplicates them, and Gold publishes reconciled trip facts.

Critical trade-off

The real-time projection is intentionally provisional. It must not become the financial source of truth because mobile events can be late, duplicated, or contradicted by payment and settlement systems.

How I would validate

I would replay one request through match, arrival, pickup, completion, payment, and cancellation paths. I would verify legal state transitions, duplicate handling, p95 event-time latency, source-offset lineage, and agreement between the online projection and the reconciled trip fact.