Katkat
Back

Design ride-hailing pricing with fairness and pooling

AmazonSoftware Engineer · Onsite
HardSoftware EngineerOnsiteSystem Design

Last updated

This question evaluates system design and algorithmic skills related to real-time distributed pricing, API and data-flow architecture, carpooling logic, fairness constraints, and experimentation support.

Design and implement a pricing engine for a ride-hailing platform that maximizes company revenue while ensuring fairness to riders and drivers. Requirements:

  1. Expose an API that, given a user request, returns multiple candidate routes for the rider to choose;
  2. Compute a price for each candidate route using distance, duration, demand/supply, waiting time, and driver incentives;
  3. Support carpooling: when a rider opts into pooling, compute the rider’s price considering shared segments and detours;
  4. Enforce fairness constraints (e.g., caps on surge multipliers, equitable pricing across neighborhoods, transparent breakdowns);
  5. Allow experimentation with pricing strategies and guardrails;
  6. Handle real-time updates to demand and driver availability. Deliverables: a high-level system design covering components, data flows, and storage, plus pseudocode or code for the core price calculation function with inputs, outputs, and complexity. Discuss trade-offs, assumptions, and how you would validate fairness.