Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Uber SDE-1 and SDE-2 loops in India — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Round 1 — DSA + System Design Screening
A DP-on-trees problem (Optimal Search Tree variant); the candidate ran out of time before reaching the system-design portion of the round.
Round 2 — Pure DSA
A DP / game-theory problem (Optimal Strategy for a Game variant).
Round 3 — Machine Coding + LLD
Build a mini Unix-like file-system CLI (mkdir, cd, ls, pwd) end to end.
Round 4 — HLD with a Staff Engineer
Design a bill-splitting / expense-settlement system, with a focus on debt-simplification and schema design.
Round 5 — Managerial / Behavioral
STAR-style questions on past projects and ownership.
Key takeaway: Prepare a written summary of past achievements ahead of the managerial round, and prioritize getting machine-coding solutions to a runnable state quickly so remaining time can go toward debugging and edge cases.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Online Assessment
Three DSA problems of increasing difficulty.
🔒 4 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit