I interviewed a few months ago for a full-time software engineer position at Uber. I got the interview opportunity through a friend referral.

I was first scheduled for one round of phone screening, which was given by an engineering manager at Uber. I was asked about my technical background, my work, as well as two coding problems. It went very well, and I was invited for an onsite interview one hour after the phone call.

The onsite interview occurred two weeks later and lasted about 4.5 hours. Four people challenged me with many technical questions, such as whiteboard coding and system design problems. Everyone was pretty friendly, and the interviews ran quite on time, so there wasn't much break time in between.

The last technical interview was practical: I was asked to solve a real-world problem and implement it subsequently. Before the actual coding work, the interviewer had a thorough discussion with me on details at all levels to ensure it was a reasonable solution that could be done in a matter of minutes. The problem wasn't super hard, and the solution could be suboptimal, but you needed to make it work. Therefore, you better be a hands-on engineer at work and write real code in an efficient way (editor choice, API lookup, debugging skills, etc.). For myself, I use Vim every day, and that helped me a lot.

Following the fourth round of technical interviews, I also got the chance to talk to the recruiter and hiring manager about various questions and concerns, which they addressed very well.

I received an offer the next day after the onsite interview, which, after some negotiation, I happily accepted. One thing I'd like to point out is that I was blown away by the company's efficiency during the whole hiring process. The hiring manager and a few recruiters I worked with always responded very promptly, within a few minutes.

By the way, I live in the South Bay, and commuting to/from San Francisco was, of course, covered using Uber, making the interview experience even more pleasant.

whiteboard coding, live coding, design, culture questions, that kind of stuff.