Design real-time driver heatmap system
UberSoftware Engineer · Onsite
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This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design real-time distributed systems for geospatial aggregation, covering skills in spatial partitioning, high-throughput streaming ingestion, low-latency cell counting, WebSocket-based client updates, and top-K ranking within a fault-tolerant multi-region architecture.
Design a real-time driver heatmap for a ride-hailing platform. Partition the city into grid cells (e.g., geohash), ingest driver pings, and stream updates to clients over WebSockets. Compute and publish the top-K hottest cells per region with low latency. Detail the data model, aggregation strategy (edge vs. server), update frequency, scalability, fault tolerance, and how clients subscribe/unsubscribe.
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