I sent a direct email to a recruiter there saying I was looking for a new job and was interested in Uber. He almost instantly answered to my email offering to hop on the phone the following morning to chat about what I was looking for. We spend ~20min on the phone trying to figure out what my strengths were and what I was looking for, and we concluded that growth would be a good fit.
I was quitting my job 2 weeks later, and am on a working visa, so I stressed them about being in a rush and to please make the process as fast as possible. Which they did.
Sent me a coding challenge right after the phone call - Multiple choices of different APIs to use and do something about it; I did it in the shape of a backbone app with a ruby backend. Worked on this over the weekend (I found it really fun to do actually) and sent it over on monday.
Tuesday I had a interview scheduled - they knew I was taking a plane Friday, so they happily scheduled the itw on Thursday.
Spend about 4 hours there, split in 4 interviews of different types. Algorithms, problem solving, live code and front-end.
All interviews were done by 2 interviewers, all from the growth team, all seems super excited about the team and the company.
The interviews, despite being quite stressful, were actually a lot of fun.
The fourth interview was a wrap up with the team's manager, who told me not to worry, everybody really liked me so they'll send an offer my way. I would negotiate offer details with the recruiter.
We then chatted casually about his background, mine, some other random stuff and had a quick tour of the office and was introduce to random people we walked by. That was really cool and I felt really valued.
I originally contacted Uber because I happened to have a hold of a recruiter's email, but was not especially into Uber. I was generally aiming a bigger startups (airbnb, sqaure and facebook were my other main choices), but this interview really just made me wanna work for the company.
The next morning I chatted with the recruiter on the phone while waiting for my place. Again a nice casual chat were he asked me what kind of offer I was expecting and it all seemed really just to be about how to get somewhere that would make me happy.
He clearly explain the stock options plan, etc.
We got to an agreement and told me the offer would be taken care of and sent to me by email the following week. I instantly called all other pending offers and interviews and cancelled.
The rest of the week was spent taking care of my visa and all went flawless.
I've been at Uber for more than a year now, and I'm still convinced I made the best choice in my career!