Uber L5A Loop
Design and ownership rounds carry the L5A decision. Expect pushback on failure modes such as datacenter outages, demand surges, and backpressure, and a senior candidate who codes well but designs shallowly typically gets an L4 offer.
The Rounds
Screens
- Recruiter CallCovers the scope of your recent work, target team, and level. · 30 minPractice Recruiter Call
- Technical Phone ScreenA coding problem in CodeSignal, sometimes with questions on past design and architecture work. · 60 minPractice Technical Phone Screen
Onsite
- CodingOne or two rounds of medium problems, including a depth-in-specialization round for your domain. · 60 minPractice Coding
- System DesignOne or two rounds held to a senior bar, with capacity, failure modes, and the tradeoffs behind each choice. · 60 minPractice System Design
- Collaboration and LeadershipWith the hiring manager: projects across dependent teams, mentoring, and work with partners outside engineering.Practice Collaboration and Leadership
- Bar RaiserAn interviewer from outside the team, often running a deep dive into one project: its architecture, impact, and failures. · 60 minPractice Bar Raiser
What the L5A Loop Weighs
- Failure handling in design: outages, surges, and backpressure.
- A deep-dive project of one to three quarters that you led and can defend in detail.
- Stories of mentoring and of work that spanned dependent teams.
- Runnable, tested code that holds up under follow-up questions.
Sources
Last checked Nov 2026. Loops vary by team and change over time, so confirm the details with your recruiter.
- Uber Careers: Engineering Interview Guide
- Uber Careers: Backend Engineering Interview Guide
- interviewing.io: Uber Interview Process and Questions
- Aced: Uber Software Engineer Interview Guide
- The Pragmatic Engineer: Uber's Engineering Level Changes
- Design Gurus: Uber Software Engineer Levels Explained
- TechInterview: How Uber Interviews Software Engineers in 2026