Senior Staff Backend Engineer - Driver Pricing Platform Infrastructure

Senior Staff Backend Engineer

We're seeking an exceptional Senior Staff Backend Engineer to lead the design and implementation of next-generation platform infrastructure for Uber's Driver Pricing systems. This is a high-impact role where you'll architect and build the real-time distributed systems that power pricing decisions for millions of drivers across 70+ countries around the world. You'll tackle some of the most complex infrastructure challenges in the industry: building sub-50ms latency systems that handle 1M+ requests per second, designing platform abstractions that enable rapid iteration on pricing algorithms, creating developer-friendly APIs that multiple engineering teams can build upon, and handling complex marketplace dynamics with strategic agent behavior. Your infrastructure will directly enable breakthrough ML innovations while maintaining the reliability standards critical for tens of billions of dollars in marketplace transactions. As a Senior Staff Backend Engineer reporting directly to the Engineering Director, you'll drive technical architecture decisions, mentor senior engineers, and establish platform engineering excellence across the Driver Pricing organization while building systems that serve as the foundation for Uber's marketplace optimization. Your work will involve a combination of backend engineering, platform development, analytics, experimentation infrastructure, developer tooling, and optimization. We are looking for a strong generalist who can adapt to various technical challenges and bring innovative solutions to our dynamic team.

What You Will Do

Technical Architecture & Leadership

• Lead the design and implementation of distributed pricing platform infrastructure serving millions of drivers with sub-50ms latency requirements
• Architect systems that handle 1M+ requests per second while maintaining 99.99% availability and strong consistency guarantees
• Drive technical strategy for platform evolution, API design, and microservices architecture supporting Driver Pricing and broader Marketplace teams
• Collaborate across multiple director and VP level organizations to align technical work and release reliable improvements
• Build data warehouse architecture and feature stores to power simulation and modeling capabilities
• Design and optimize streaming/batch data processing systems and cloud resource management (e.g., Yarn, Peloton)

Platform & Developer Experience

• Build platform abstractions and developer tools that enable ML and product engineering teams to iterate rapidly on pricing algorithms
• Design clean APIs and abstractions that hide complexity while providing powerful capabilities for experimentation
• Establish platform engineering best practices, monitoring, observability, and operational excellence
• Create tooling and frameworks supporting various experimental methodologies on top of Uber's experimentation platform

Cross-Functional Impact

• Partner with ML Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to translate business requirements into scalable platform solutions
• Collaborate with broader Uber Platform teams to leverage shared infrastructure while building domain-specific optimizations
• Influence technical roadmaps across multiple teams through technical leadership and strategic platform thinking

Team Development

• Mentor and grow senior backend engineers, establishing technical standards and engineering culture
• Lead architecture reviews and technical discussions for complex distributed systems
• Drive knowledge sharing and platform engineering excellence across the Driver Pricing engineering organization
• Stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and technologies to ensure Uber's systems remain at the forefront of innovation

Basic Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, or equivalent technical education

10+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems in large-scale production environments

Expert-level proficiency in backend technologies including Go, Java, or Python with deep understanding of high-performance system design

Deep expertise across multiple areas including:

• Distributed Systems Architecture
• Real-time/Low-latency Systems
• Microservices Design
• API Architecture
• Database Systems
• Platform Engineering

Proven track record of leading complex infrastructure projects from architecture through production with significant measurable impact

Proven experience building high-throughput systems handling millions of requests per second with strict latency requirements

Technical leadership experience including mentoring senior engineers and driving cross-team technical initiatives

Preferred Qualifications

Real-time marketplace platform experience with understanding of consistency, reliability, and performance requirements

Platform engineering expertise building developer tools and abstractions used by multiple engineering teams

Streaming systems experience with Kafka, Flink, or similar real-time data processing frameworks

Database and caching expertise with systems like MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, or distributed data stores

Cloud infrastructure experience with GCP, OCI, containerization (Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code

Observability and monitoring expertise building comprehensive logging, metrics, and alerting systems

Experience building and migrating to hardened interfaces for data access and API design

Proven examples of dramatically improving developer velocity through platform abstractions

Technical Skills

Required:

• Advanced distributed systems architecture and design patterns
• Real-time/low-latency system optimization and performance tuning
• Microservices architecture and API design at scale
• Database design and optimization for high-throughput systems
• Platform engineering and developer productivity tools
• System reliability, monitoring, and operational excellence
• Cloud infrastructure and containerization technologies

Preferred:

• Event-driven architecture and stream processing
• Caching strategies and distributed data consistency
• Experimentation and feature flag frameworks
• Infrastructure automation and deployment pipelines
• ML infrastructure and model training/serving platforms

Why This Role Matters

Your platform infrastructure will directly enable:

• Pricing algorithm innovation by providing reliable, fast infrastructure that ML teams can build upon
• Developer productivity through clean abstractions and tools that accelerate engineering velocity across multiple teams
• Business performance supporting tens of billions of dollars in gross bookings annually with extremely fault-tolerant systems
• Technical excellence establishing platform engineering standards and best practices used across Uber

Come join our team and help Uber's Driver Pricing platform scale into the future as we continue to grow exponentially with a global footprint, millions of drivers, and continued marketplace expansion! As one of Uber's world-class engineers, you will be empowered to push the envelope in scalability, distributed systems, reliability, and more.

What We Value

Exceptional technical depth in distributed systems combined with practical platform engineering skills

Developer empathy and platform thinking focused on enabling other teams to move faster

Strategic architecture mindset for building systems that evolve and scale with business growth

Collaborative leadership building consensus around technical decisions across multiple engineering teams

Operational excellence with focus on reliability, performance, and maintainability of critical business systems