Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Core Services

About the Team

The Core Services Team builds and maintains the mission-critical, high-throughput, and fault-tolerant foundational services that power the entire Uber platform. This includes global-scale services for Safety, Identity, Payments, and other core business logic.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader who operates with a broad scope, influencing the technical direction not just within your team but across multiple dependent platform and product teams. You will drive the design and implementation of highly scalable, reliable, and performant distributed systems, setting a high bar for engineering excellence and mentoring senior engineers across the organization.

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and architecture of large-scale, resilient backend services and distributed systems for core platform components (e.g., ensuring high availability, sub-millisecond latency, and strict data consistency).

• Own complex backend technical initiatives that impact major product areas or multiple infrastructure and cross-platform engineering teams.

• Drive technical decision-making and establish architectural standards and patterns for the wider Core Services organization, focusing on scalability, security, and multi-region fault tolerance.

• Implement critical, high-performance backend features and microservices using modern languages (e.g., Go, Java) and infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Cassandra, Redis), ensuring they are secure and maintainable.

• Champion a culture of operational excellence by establishing best practices for observability, proactive monitoring, automated load testing, and incident response.

• Aggressively identify and resolve systemic technical debt, architectural bottlenecks, and non-performant queries/logic across foundational backend systems.

• Partner closely with Staff Engineers, Engineering Managers, and Product Managers to define technical roadmaps that align with long-term business strategy, specifically regarding the evolution of our core service APIs and data models.

• Represent the team and its technical strategy in cross-organizational forums and drive consensus on complex technical tradeoffs between feature velocity, system stability, and infrastructure costs.

• Act as a force multiplier by mentoring other backend engineers, elevating the technical capabilities and "systems thinking" of the entire organization.

• Provide in-depth, rigorous feedback in design and code reviews for critical systems, emphasizing distributed systems best practices, concurrency safety, and resource efficiency.

• Contribute to the engineering culture by championing best practices in testing, CI/CD, and security-first development.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience as a Software Engineer, with significant experience in designing, building, and operating large-scale, high-availability distributed systems in a production environment.

• Deep expertise in Backend Infrastructure: Strong mastery of microservices architecture, distributed databases, caching strategies, and asynchronous messaging systems.

• Proven Leadership: Ability to lead multi-quarter projects, break down ambiguous technical problems, and drive complex initiatives to successful completion across team boundaries.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.

• SRE Principles: Deep experience with site reliability engineering, including error budgeting, SLO/SLA definition, and building self-healing systems.

• Influence: A track record of influencing backend engineering strategy and architecture across different organizational boundaries and functional areas.

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Ready to Ride?

This isn't the kind of place where you follow a playbook — it's where you help write one. If you're driven by impact, energized by challenge, and ready to shape how the world moves — we'd love to hear from you.

You may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and other compensation, as well as a range of benefits. Explore our benefits.

Offices remain key to collaboration and Uber's culture. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Some roles, like those at greenlight hubs, require full-time in-office presence. Ask your Recruiter for details about this role's requirements.

Uber is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.