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Lesson 13 of 15

44. Design Ride-Hailing with Surge Pricing (Uber / Rapido)

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The interview prompt
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44.1 What do you ask first?
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44.2 How big is this, really?
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44.3 What are the doors?
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44.4 What do we store?
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44.5 What does the whole system look like?
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44.6 How are location updates handled?
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44.7 How does matching work?
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44.8 How does surge pricing work?
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44.9 How does the trip state machine work?
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44.10 What would you say in the last five minutes?
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Score yourself
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Variations to practise
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Sources
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Code lab
44. Design Ride-Hailing with Surge Pricing (Uber / Rapido)

Variations to practise

3 min read+10 XP

Chapters used

Approach (1), Estimation (2), Transactions and atomic assignment (17), Geospatial indexing (18), Real-time connections (21), Message queues and streams (22), APIs and idempotency (24), Failures (29), Checkout and payments (42).

Try these variations

Each is a common follow-up. Answer in two minutes, then check the sketch.

  1. "Shared rides." → Match riders whose routes overlap; insert pickups into an existing trip if the detour stays under a limit; split the fare.
  2. "Airport queue." → Drivers at the airport join a FIFO queue in a geofenced zone; trips there are offered by queue order, not distance.
  3. "Food delivery instead of rides." → Same index and matching, plus restaurant prep time: dispatch the rider so they arrive when the food is ready.
  4. "10× drivers." → More index shards per city (by cell range), lower update rates for idle drivers, and batch ETA computation.