Uber Business Operations Manager (BizOps) Interview Guide

tl;dr

On New Years’ eve of 2009, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp hailed an overpriced cab. That pricey trip spawned an app that has since become its own verb: with the tap of a button, users Uber medication, freight, food, groceries, and people. Uber facilitates over 28 million daily trips for its more than 150 million monthly active users worldwide, and 6 million active drivers. As of 2024, it generated over $43 billion dollars in revenue through its 4 product offerings: Uber Eats, Uber Freight, Ridesharing, and Uber for Business.

As Uber expands the cities it serves, it’s currently hiring business operations (or BizOps) professionals to serve as the intermediaries between data scientists, engineers, and executive leadership. Business operations interview loops at Uber have a fairly standardized cadence, and have questions specific to the product offering you’ll be working on. Regardless of team or org within Uber, BizOps interviewers are looking for candidates with experience in:

• Data manipulation and analysis using Microsoft Excel
• Python and SQL
• End-to-end cross-functional project leadership with meaningful business impacts

What does an Uber Business Operations Manager do?

As a manager of business operations, you’ll be the one empowering global leadership, as well as regional and local teams using your technical skills and analytical insights. BizOps sits at the intersection of hard data and executive leadership. Day-to-day, you’ll be the advocate for the engineering and data science members of your team, relaying and translating their needs to executive leadership as you make decisions around spending and targeting methodologies.

Regional leaders at Uber rely on BizOps to be a crucial resource addressing the issues that affect Uber’s millions of monthly users, like user attrition. As such, you’ll be expected to be the person preparing and presenting cases to be understood by diverse teams of both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Beyond responding to these more ad-hoc scenarios, you’ll also present cases and make recommendations to leadership around business segments. Since you’ll be the one making recommendations, Uber expects you to have proficiency in SQL, Python, and Excel, as well as business acumen and strategic planning.

Culturally, Uber is all about hiring go-getters, describing their ideal candidates as “relentless” and just as obsessed by movement, precision, and speed as the product offerings they work on. Uber values fast and thorough thinking under pressure, so you can expect to be solving complex problems and making a meaningful real-world impact in a relatively short amount of time.

The average total compensation across the most common levels of business operations managers at Uber is:

• L3: $108K– 135K
• L4: $162K–$189K

Before you apply

• Research recently asked interview questions for Uber Strategy & Ops roles.
• Sharpen your business operations and strategy interview skills.
• Check out Uber’s newsroom for updates on new products and features.
• Try the Uber product offering (Eats, Freight, Rideshare, and Uber for Business) this specific team works on, so you can speak to market needs as an end user.

Interview process

Most interviews within Uber’s business operations teams take around 3 weeks, with candidates mentioning the process taking one or two weeks longer for more senior roles.

Interviewing at Uber is designed to feel as similar as possible to working there. Unlike many companies which tend to ask interview questions about hypothetical products or scenarios, the questions you’ll be asked at Uber are anonymized versions of real data that’s passed through your future team.

Typically, all of Uber’s interviewing is conducted over Zoom. That said, Uber’s current RTO policy is a hybrid model, so you can expect to work in one of their many global office locations on Tuesdays and Thursdays if you get an offer.

The interview process is relatively short compared to companies with similar size and reach, with 4 main steps before getting your offer:

• A 30-minute phone call with a recruiter to assess your resume match and coach you on the process.
• A take-home Excel assessment to gauge your analytical skills.
• A 45-minute call with a hiring manager to talk through a recent project, behavioral questions, and a mini-case.
• An hour-long panel interview where you’ll present answers to another take-home task.

1. Recruiter screen

You can expect to be asked basic recruiter questions about your background and experience, with relatively little focus on details or technical know-how beyond how long you’ve worked with Python, Excel, or SQL. Your recruiter will want to confirm that your resume is accurate and lines up with the job description. You’ll likely also get  asked the classic “why Uber” question.

Some topics include:

• Your resume
• Your experience, both with project types and technical tools
• Your next steps in the process

Recent questions include:

• Tell me about your resume.
• What is your experience with SQL?
• Why Uber?
• Where are you located?
• How do you approach stakeholder management?
• How do you approach analytics?

2. Excel assessment

Within a few days of your recruiter interview, you’ll be emailed your Excel assessment. This take-home task generally contains 10 questions centered around a set of data, and you’ll be given between 3–5 days to complete and return it. Since Uber is  speed-focused, it’s in your best interest to return this assessment as efficiently as you can while still answering each question thoroughly. Later in your interview process, you’ll be asked to make inferences from an incomplete data set, but in this round, your interviewers want to see how you work in Excel, so you can expect a complete data set here.

This round is essential for both screening out and downleveling candidates, so make sure you give yourself enough time to bring your A-game. Don’t just solve the problems, but present your answers in an organized and legible way. Exceptional candidates tend to solve each question in a separate tab of the Excel sheet and focus on readability, using as many illustrative visuals as possible to clarify solutions. You can expect to use both Python and SQL to interact with your data sets before inputting them into Excel.

The data you’ll be working with will be relevant to the team you’re applying for, so in the case of Uber Eats, you’ll likely be given a data set of Uber Eats’ 3 main marketplace-as-business segments (vendors, couriers, and eaters) in a location, and a set of questions that will ask you to manipulate and analyze that data. Typically, applicants who do well on these questions have used pivot tables effectively and are able to notice all the nuance cases in each question (e.g., cases where you’ll need to notice how time comes into play).

Common mistakes resulting in downleveling include:

• Merging data sets with different structures and then only interacting with the merged data set.
• Analyzing all data the same way, regardless of the relationship it describes. Before you solve anything, notice if the relationships are 1-to-1, 1-to-many, or many-to-many, since that’ll affect your solutions.

Some topics include:

• GROUPBY functions
• Pivot tables
• Sum-if and count-if formulas
• Calculated fields

Recent questions include:

• Given a set of Uber Eats order data for the fictional U-City:
  • In the week of April 11, defined as April 11 (Monday) to April 17 (Sunday):
    • What is the average number of orders per eater overall?
    • What is the average number of orders per member?
    • What is the average number of orders per non-member?
  • At what stage do most orders fail?
  • What is Uber Eats’ net margin per delivered order on Chains?
  • What % of orders in the month of April 2022 were first-time orders?
  • What cuisine has the lowest net margin per delivered order in the suburbs?
  • What is the most- and least-ordered cuisine in U-City?
  • How many orders did the most popular merchant receive in April 2022?
  • For what cuisine do couriers wait the longest at the restaurant before moving towards dropoff?
  • What is the average promotion amount per order for non-members?

3. Hiring manager round

This 45-minute conversation is split into 2 main sections: a walk-through of a past project of yours, and a live mini-case focusing on a real-world scenario at Uber.

During the first half, you’ll be asked to walk through a recent analytical project, emphasizing its meaningful business impact. Your interviewer will follow up, both going deep into the details of your project, and asking you behavioral and culture-fit questions, since you likely won’t have a dedicated interview for either area later in the process. These types of questions won’t start like the traditional “tell me about a time,” but if they ask you “so during this project, how did you work with…” you can assume they want a behavioral answer.

Uber’s hiring managers are really interested in the “so what” of your project, including where it stands now, what you recommend for next steps, and what some areas for improvement are. They'll also be looking to hear quantifiable and large-scale impact, usually in a dollar or user amount. If you’re coming from a smaller company or have a smaller project, showcase project complexity or examples of innovation and measurable improvements, like partnerships and technical tools.

During the mini-case half of the interview, the hiring manager wants to make sure you understand the dynamics of the Uber product area you’re applying for. In the case of Uber Eats, they want to make sure you have a clear understanding of the marketplace-as-business model (including the vendors, couriers, and eaters) and their marketplace dynamics. The scenario you’ll get will map fairly clearly onto recent activity on your future team, and your recruiter will ask you a series of iterative questions to get a sense of how you choose and design metrics, and what data you gather before making recommendations.

Some topics include:

• Metrics design
• Radius reduction

Recent questions include:

• Tell me about a recent project you're proud of.
• How did you manage conflicting priorities on the project?
• How did you evaluate the success of your project?
• How do you prioritize your work?
• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a cross-functional teammate.
• Mini-case: Let's say Uber was entering the grocery business for the first time and was throwing a pilot program to test the market out. What sorts of KPIs would you want to measure for this program to determine its success?
• Mini-case: Say that restaurants are underperforming in a region, and a manager comes to you and asks you what’s going on. They give you the KPIs you’d investigate first and what they think the problem is. What metrics do you pick to check that assumption, and what are your recommendations?

4. Panel interview

After your hiring manager interview, you’ll be sent another data set and prompt, and be given another 3–5 days to address it. You’ll be expected to prepare a presentation on your solutions to the prompt. In the hour-long panel interview, you’ll present your solution to ~5 people.

The interviewers on your panel tend to not be your peers; some may be skip-levels, but more likely, they’ll be execs from different business areas who will ask you questions relevant to those business areas during your presentation.

Unlike the Excel assessment, expect the data set you get to be incomplete. You’ll have to make some assumptions about parts of it (e.g., demographics) before you work with it. Be ready to justify those assumptions, since your panelists will ask you about them in depth.

While visual branding for your presentation isn’t explicitly required, your panel will respond more strongly to a presentation that looks consistent with Uber’s visual style, or at least is visually appealing and coherent. Stellar candidates focus their presentation on business impact and solutions, even if you’re most proud of your technical work and analysis. Assume that your panel will include non-technical execs, and structure your answer to be legible to them.

Some topics include:

• Market segmentation
• Fees

Recent questions include:

• Consider the impacts of the 3-sided marketplace when 1 user group grows. What caused the growth, and what are your recommendations?
• In U-City, Uber has been here for 2 years and only holds 18% of the market, and our main competitor has been here for 4 years. Diagnose the problems affecting our market penetration. Make recommendations, given an incomplete data set and demographic information.
• How do you segment the data? Are you thinking about enterprise vs. small businesses? What segment of vendors do you target to optimize market penetration?

Additional resources

• Take Exponent’s Business Operations course to level up your metrics, strategy, and data expertise.
• Get coaching for actionable feedback from experts in business operations at Uber.
• Prep with mock interviews on the most commonly asked engineering questions.

FAQs about the senior BizOps manager interview at Uber

How should I prepare for a business operations interview at Uber?

• Research recently asked interview questions at Uber for business operations.
• Brush up on your data-centric Python and SQL.
• Check out Uber’s newsroom to stay on top of new launches.

How much do Uber Business Operations Managers make?

The average total compensation across the most common levels of business operations managers at Uber is:

• L3: $108K–135K
• L4: $162K–$189K

How long is the Uber Business Operations Manager interview process?

Typically, the interview process for BizOps roles at Uber lasts between 3–5 weeks.

Does Uber have an RTO policy?

Yes, Uber has a hybrid work policy for employees, with Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” in your nearest office location. You’ll likely interview entirely remotely, though.

If I get rejected, how long should I wait before re-applying?

Uber doesn’t have a “cooling-off” period, so you can apply as soon as you find a good role.