Find a Rider for Uber or Uber Eats — System Design Interview Practice

Interview prompt

Design match riders or delivery customers to nearby eligible drivers in real time so users can find and reserve a driver reliably at scale.

• Define the source of truth for offer and assignment state and make retries idempotent.
• Use bounded, partitioned state to meet 1M active drivers and 1M location updates per second and candidate response <=500ms.
• Separate the critical request path from location ingestion, pricing, retries, and notifications.
• Explain consistency, failure recovery, authorization, observability, and a degraded mode.

Requirements and scale assumptions

• Support the core workflow to find and reserve a driver.
• Expose status, results, and freshness appropriate to match riders or delivery customers to nearby eligible drivers in real time.
• Support authorization, validation, updates, deletion, and recovery semantics.
• Meet candidate response <=500ms under normal load.
• Scale to 1M active drivers and 1M location updates per second without a single hot key or unbounded synchronous work.
• Do not lose committed state; make retries and duplicate events safe.
• Degrade safely when downstream workers, caches, or external dependencies fail.
• 1M active drivers and 1M location updates per second
• Partition by the primary tenant, user, item, or geographic key and isolate hot partitions.
• Keep serving state bounded; retain raw events or durable records for replay and auditing.

• Peak scale: 1M active drivers — Capacity assumption that drives partitioning and backpressure.
• Latency target: candidate response <=500ms — User-facing budget for the primary request or read path.
• Durable boundary: Committed before async — The source of truth is offer and assignment state.
• Async boundary: At-least-once workers — Keep location ingestion, pricing, retries, and notifications off the synchronous path.

Key entities

• InteractioninteractionId, actorId, objectId, type, version, occurredAt

  Canonical uber rider matching interaction with an idempotency key and ordering version.

• ConnectionSessionsessionId, userId, deviceId, roomKey, lastHeartbeat, status

  Ephemeral but observable uber rider matching connection registration used for routing and presence.

• FanoutCursorstreamKey, shard, offset, consumerGroup, updatedAt

  Durable progress marker for uber rider matching fan-out and replay.

• DeliveryReceiptinteractionId, recipientId, channel, attempt, status, deliveredAt

  Deduplicated uber rider matching delivery state for reconnects, retries, or acknowledgements.

Data flow

1. 1. Accept and commit the interactionThe uber rider matching gateway authenticates the actor, validates room or object membership, applies rate limits, and conditionally commits the interaction.
2. 2. Publish an ordered eventAn outbox emits the committed uber rider matching transition with an event ID, partition key, sequence, and replay retention.
3. 3. Fan out by partitionConsumers route uber rider matching events to connected recipients, durable inboxes, or notification channels without making the origin write wait for every recipient.
4. 4. Resume and reconcile connectionsClients reconnect with a cursor; the uber rider matching service replays missed events, deduplicates delivery, and exposes stale or degraded state.
5. 5. Measure latency and recoverOperations tracks uber rider matching publish-to-deliver latency, hot partitions, reconnect storms, dropped events, and consumer lag for replay or repair.

Deep dives and trade-offs

• Ordering, idempotency, and hot keysChoose a uber rider matching partition key that preserves required order while distributing high-volume rooms, users, or objects. Use event IDs, inboxes, consumer offsets, and conditional state transitions for at-least-once delivery. Split or isolate hot partitions without changing the client-visible sequence contract.
• Reconnect and replay semanticsIssue resumable uber rider matching cursors with an expiry and a clear snapshot-plus-delta fallback. Bound replay windows and rebuild from durable state when a cursor is too old. Expose version and freshness so a client can distinguish current, catching up, and degraded state.
• Backpressure and presenceKeep connection heartbeats and ephemeral presence separate from durable uber rider matching interactions. Coalesce safe updates, shed low-value work, and protect critical events during reconnect storms. Measure end-to-end delivery, not only broker publish latency.
• Direct fan-out versus pull-based readsUse push for latency-sensitive uber rider matching deltas and pull or replay for reconnect, history, and recovery. A push-only design loses state when clients disconnect and a pull-only design wastes latency and bandwidth.
• Per-recipient queues versus shared streamsUse shared partitioned streams with per-recipient cursors where fan-out is large, and isolate exceptional high-fanout objects. A queue per recipient becomes expensive and hard to inspect at large scale.
• Strong ordering versus availabilityGuarantee ordering only within the scope the product needs, such as a room, object, or conversation. Global ordering introduces a bottleneck and still does not solve duplicate delivery or reconnect recovery.