4 minute read
Powering 42 million daily connections between the digital and physical worlds through a real-time marketplace built for global reliability.
We asked engineers across Uber what it’s really like to build here—from the problems they solve and the scale they operate at to what keeps the work challenging and rewarding. Here’s what they had to say.
“No two days are ever the same! I usually start by checking emails, meeting my team, and completing outstanding tasks. One of the things I love the most about working here is that I get to code every single day. I take the time to mentor students for the Uber Career Prep program in addition to engineers on my own team and from across Uber. I also enjoy conducting interviews and try to be as helpful as I can to future Uber team members. Usually I then follow up with each of my team’s projects to see if there is anything I can unblock. As the day ends, I tend to refocus on my coding.”
- Cleber, Engineering Manager, São Paulo
“I love solving problems and at Uber scale, there are new challenges every day. Where I work, in the space of service observability and reliability, this is further magnified by a complex network of services. Recently my team was working on a persistence layer to provide service-level insight on health metrics. The scale we were solving for was 1.5 million logs/sec to be processed in real time. It took multiple iterations to find the right balance of detail, continuously optimizing to store only critical data.
These types of challenges push our teams to think outside the box and come up with state of the art solutions. There is an immense sense of achievement and satisfaction that comes with this. But more than that, what I love is the continuous cycle of iteration, failure and recovery that we work through until we reach the most simple solution possible for these complex problems.”
- Divya, Senior Engineering Manager, Bangalore
“Put a lot of emphasis on practicing technical questions (preferably LeetCode). When practicing, group questions by topic (ie: do array questions back to back and then move to let’s say trees). This allows you to see the patterns and how all questions relate to each other. Don’t memorize answers, instead understand the underlying logic and be able to share your thought process with the interviewer.
Lastly, your drive to succeed is what will get you there, so keep at it even if you’re not scoring perfectly on your mock interviews. Take every opportunity to learn and better yourself and it will pay off in the long-run!”
- Nouru, Software Engineer, San Francisco
"Uber is a great place if you care about real-world, high-scale problems with direct user and business impact.
You work on systems that operate at massive scale, where performance and reliability truly matter. There’s also a strong sense of ownership — you’re not just shipping code, you’re responsible for the full lifecycle and the outcomes.
Another thing I’d highlight is the variety of problem spaces. You can work on fintech, fraud, logistics, growth, and more — all within the same company— which keeps the work interesting and helps you grow quickly. Overall, if you’re looking to deepen your technical skills while having tangible impact, it’s a very strong environment."
- Pedro, Backend Engineer, Rio de Janeiro
“There’s still so much left to be done. From the outside, it’s easy to underestimate what it actually takes to run a system like Uber, but it turns out that handling many different business verticals globally in a single system is a very complicated problem, all the way from the various apps to how we manage bytes on disk. I personally enjoy low-level infrastructure the most, but I believe there’s plenty of opportunity to build and learn across the entire stack, and also to have an impact that’s hard to find anywhere else.”
- Joakim, Distinguished Engineer, Aarhus
