Uber Technical Program Manager Interview Guide

TL;DR the Uber TPM interview breakdown:

Step 1: Recruiter screen

Step 2: Hiring manager screen (or a technical screen with a senior TPM)

Step 3: Take-home case study + panel presentation (team-dependent)

Step 4: Onsite loop, 4–5 rounds × 1 hour

4.1 Program sense and execution

4.2 Technical depth

4.3 Communication

4.4 Bar Raiser

After the recruiter screen, there is an additional HM interview or a peer interview with a TPM who is at least one level above you.

TPM candidates at Uber will likely also have a case round which they have to present to a panel. Post that, the onsite has 4 to 5 rounds. 

This entire interview process takes anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks for most candidates, although a few have reported it took longer for them.

We also want to point out that some candidates mention interviews can be quite subjective and so how you present your experience and deliver stories matters a lot.

The first screen is a 15 to 30 min call with the recruiter, they’ll ask standard questions about your background, motivation, expectations, logistics and also try to gauge your personality.

Uber recruiters tend to screen candidates using keywords from the JD so try and use those exact terms wherever you think appropriate.

Uber recruiters have asked TPM candidates:

• What about this role interests you?
• Tell me about yourself and what you know about the role.
• What experiences have you had to support this role?

The second Uber screen for TPM candidates is a 30-60 min long interview either with the HM or with a senior TPM.

If you have a few years of experience under your belt, you should expect this call to be with a senior TPM. Senior TPMs will reportedly ask more technical questions and HMs focus on asking behavioral ones.

The feedback from this interviewer can help decide what will be covered in your onsite and case study. Your interviewers are assessing your level and their feedback carries into the onsite.

The questions reported by Uber TPM candidates at this stage:

• How do you work with teams?
• What is the most challenging part about program management?
• How do you manage multiple projects at the same time?

That’s why we recommend, for your challenging project (or whenever you’re going into detail on one story), instead of going for the one you personally found hard, you should pick one that provides supporting evidence for the right level and go into detail about what made it hard.

This case study round is team-dependent. Most TPM candidates will have one, and the topic will depend on the req along with the skills and experiences the team wants from the TPM.

You will be given a prompt and will have around a week to prepare a deck. Once you’ve made one there will be a panel interview which will take around 60 to 90 mins.

The panel interviewers will come from different teams and roles, but usually from the same function. They’re trying to understand your working and thinking process, and also how well you can think on the spot.

These prompts/follow-up questions have been asked to Uber TPM candidates:

• Prepare a case study on planning and executing a B2B commute product.
• How would you influence stakeholders at the director level or above to align on your project’s direction?
• What would be your process for ending this project?
• You have to convince top management to fund an idea of yours they’ve never heard of before, create a crisp deck to convince them.

The Uber onsite loop has four to five rounds each about an hour long. Sometimes the onsite can be split over two days as well.

For most candidates there will be one technical round and four behavioral rounds. One of the behavioral rounds could be focused entirely on communication. We’ve broken the rounds down below, but keep in mind interviewers might not stick to the theme and can ask slightly technical questions even in behavioral rounds (and vice-versa).

Expect a ton of “tell me about a time” questions. So, most of the focus will be on your past programs, but you should also expect some hypothetical questions especially on cross-functional work.

TPMs at Uber work within the Technical Strategy, Program Management, and Learning (TPML) team, alongside technical writers, technical strategists, and technical training program managers. The TPML org supports Uber’s engineering teams across the globe.

As Sr. Uber TPM Clarissa Rodrigues says, “[TPMs are] responsible for ensuring that the train stays on track, navigates any obstacles, and communicates with passengers.” Interviewers will want to see if you have shown the ability to understand why you ran into roadblocks and take concrete steps to fix them.

Questions reported by Uber TPM candidates:

• Describe how you would mitigate risks related to resources assigned to a project.
• How would you manage a cross-organizational program that goes on for multiple months and what are the key challenges you expect, and how would you prepare for them?
• Describe a situation where a dependency got blocked or a timeline shifted. How did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time when you had to make a last minute decision on a project.
• Tell me about your project? What are the difficulties you faced? How did you introduce and implement processes?

Level read is also being looked at here, so L4 candidates will be domain experts who can handle a problem on their own. L5 candidates will be expected to scope out problems and handle cross-org dependencies and director-level stakeholders. At L5 and above, candidates will also be expected to mentor others (both TPMs and non-TPM colleagues).

That’s why we suggest you prepare stories where you both scoped and executed the problem. Brownie points if you can pepper in how you coached one of your colleagues or handled a conflict in between.

Start off with crisp stories and then go deep wherever needed to. A Prepfully Uber TPM coach says you should give interviewers a trailer to make sure you’re on the right track.

The technical round will focus on systems and technologies you’ve worked on. Depending on the req, you might also be asked some domain-specific questions.

As this Uber employee on Blind confirmed, the expectation for TPMs is to be able to describe components, understand and think of use cases, and explain the technical flow of things you’ve worked on.

These questions have been reported by Uber TPM candidates in technical rounds:

• What experience do you have with network and AV infrastructure?
• What type of metrics did you use to understand retention and growth with your experiment?
• When data pipelines break, what’s your prioritization strategy?
• How would you scope and solve a safety analytics problem for Uber?
• How would you set up a testing framework for a new program?

There is no separate QA team at Uber and engineers own testing and monitoring. Which means you might be asked questions around how to handle those risks and account for them in the program.

TPM candidates at Uber could also have a separate interview explicitly focused on communication.

Uber is looking for how well you translate technical issues to non-technical stakeholders. They also want to see which issues you bring up to executives and how you frame them. Do you offer solutions along with issues? 

A couple of candidates have also reported they were asked to submit some writing samples for interviewers from this round.

TPM candidates at Uber have reported these questions:

• How do you influence your teammates to change their belief and process?
• Have you ever faced a communication problem while managing a program? Who with? And how did you resolve it?
• So for this program, what criteria did you use to determine priorities for the team and how did you communicate them?
• How do you decide which issues to bring to leadership and what details do you include?

There will be a Bar Raiser who could appear in any of the rounds. 

These specialized interviewers are not TPMs and will come from outside the hiring organization. Bar Raisers are checking for high-level cultural fit, and will try to press and figure out your strengths and weaknesses.

Uber Bar Raisers have asked these questions in the past:

• Can you explain the tech stack of your previous company and what can be improved?
• Tell me about a time when you took leadership calls? What’s your leadership style?
• Tell me about a situation in which you had to lead with influence and not direct management? How did you achieve your goal/outcome?
• Software projects don’t always go according to plan. Tell me about a time you faced such a situation and what you did.
• How do you take criticism? And how do you give constructive criticism? 

Uber Bar Raisers will focus on leadership and problems that require finesse and soft skills. One of our coaches says soft issues need to be backed by data, and should also include prioritization and trade-offs. On top of that you should touch upon how relationships should be managed:

Some candidates at Uber have described the Bar Raisers as ‘hostile’ or trying to contradict or argue against them, so be prepared for an unfriendly interviewer as well. If you need a strong read on where your stories land against the bar, a mock interview with an Uber TPM coach on Prepfully can give you actionable feedback before your onsite.

Once the onsite is done with, your recruiter and hiring team get together to review your interview performance and make the final decision.

Uber usually does not negotiate level post your interview loop. Senior TPMs are Level 5s, which is further split into 5a and 5b. If you’re assigned 5a, you might be able to argue for 5b but an entire level up post the loop is quite rare.

Leveling is mostly dependent on your years of experience along with interview performance. Interviewers also look at any industry experience you have with niche skills that could be relevant like distributed systems or security engineering, and award you extra points for those.

Total comp for Uber TPMs starts from $181K at L4 to $495K+ at L6, with an overall median around $340K, according to levels.fyi.

RSUs usually vest on a front-loaded schedule of 35/30/20/15 percent split across four years.