About the role and team
Engineering at Uber means building for real-world impact under real-world constraints. As a Senior Staff Backend Engineer, you will lead the architecture and implementation of next-generation distributed systems that power the bedrock of Uber. This is a high-stakes, high-impact role where you’ll tackle some of the most complex infrastructure challenges in the industry: building sub-50ms latency systems that handle 1M+ requests per second, and designing resilient platforms that power tens of billions of dollars in global marketplace transactions across 70+ countries.
This isn't just about writing code; it's about setting the technical direction for an entire organization in a fast-moving, high-ambiguity environment. You will need to move the needle for the business by building systems that are not only highly available and reliable but also developer-friendly, enabling rapid innovation across ML and Product teams. If you think in systems, stay calm under the pressure of global scale, and are motivated by the "messy" reality of solving hard problems—this is where you’ll grow.
What you’ll do
- Own architectural direction for modularization, build system, dependency management, and componentization across a multi-team mobile monorepo.
- Drive app-size and performance initiatives — including market-specific app binaries via dynamic feature modules — that unlock growth in cost-sensitive markets without compromising the premium experience.
- Lead cross-platform rendering and code-push initiatives that enable feature teams to ship faster and reduce reliance on app-store release cycles.
- Partner cross-geography with platform, product, and feature engineering leads (Bay Area, Bangalore, Amsterdam) to land decisions that scale to hundreds of engineers.
- Raise the technical bar through design review, code review, and mentorship of senior ICs; represent mobile-platform thinking at L6+ engineering forums.
Basic Qualifications
- 14+ years of mobile engineering experience with deep production expertise in Kotlin (Android) or Swift (iOS) and working familiarity with the other platform.
- Track record of leading large-scale mobile architecture decisions — modularization, build systems (Bazel or equivalent), dependency management, app-size optimization, or dynamic delivery — at consumer apps with 50M+ MAU.
- Proven ability to set technical strategy across multiple teams — write design docs that ship, drive consensus among senior engineers, and influence engineering leadership without direct authority.
Preferred Qualifications
- Has owned a platform or infrastructure layer that other feature teams build on (not feature work) — modularization frameworks, build-system migrations, OTA / code-push systems, feature flagging at the binary level, or mobile A/B-test infrastructure.
- Background optimizing apps for emerging markets — sub 40MB binaries, 2G/3G networks, 1GB RAM devices — with measurable wins on install rate, retention, or crash-free sessions.
- Has driven a major architectural migration end-to-end (monolith → modular, native → cross-platform for select surfaces, or single-binary → market-specific dynamic delivery) and shipped it to 100% of users.
- Cross-platform rendering framework experience (KMP, React Native, Flutter, or comparable in-house equivalents) — valuable for evaluating and integrating cross-platform tooling.
- Active in the mobile engineering community — speaker at Droidcon / AppDevCon, OSS contributor, or technical writer on mobile architecture.