Sr Staff Engineer - Backend

Uber Technologies Inc.; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Uber Technologies Inc. in Sunnyvale is seeking a Senior Staff Backend Engineer to lead architecture for next-generation distributed systems with sub-50ms latency and 1M+ requests per second powering global marketplace transactions.

This role requires building scalable, highly available platforms, driving platform evolution and API design, and creating developer-friendly tools to accelerate ML and product development across teams. Collaboration with Product, Data Science, and Ops is essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of backend development experience in large-scale production environments.
• Proven ability to lead organization-wide development and adoption of key frameworks and coding best practices.
• Experience foreseeing architectural problems or opportunities a year in advance with leadership buy-in.
• Track record of leading large-scale engineering projects from inception to productionization.
• Expertise in testing, monitoring, and alerting standards and incident management at scale.
• Ability to create org-wide frameworks that improve developer velocity and reduce technical debt.
• Proven leadership in building relationships with stakeholders and partners to drive a technical vision.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of highly available, resilient, and cost-efficient distributed systems with sub-50ms latency.
• Architect systems capable of handling 1M+ requests per second with 99.99% availability and strong consistency for critical flows.
• Drive technical strategy for platform evolution, microservices, and API design for new lines of business and partners.
• Build platform abstractions and developer tools to hide complex infrastructure and enable rapid ML/product iteration.
• Spearhead architectural transitions toward Dual-rail resiliency for mission-critical payments and pricing flows.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and Ops at director/VP levels to translate requirements into scalable platform solutions.
• Own architecture reviews, reduce systemic debt, and raise observability and incident response standards.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend development

System architecture

Go/Java/Python

Leadership

Observability

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

Tools

Go

Java

Python

Kafka

Flink

Kubernetes

GCP

Job description

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

• Lead the design and implementation of highly available, resilient, and cost-efficient distributed systems that serve millions of users with strict sub-50ms latency requirements.
• Architect systems capable of handling 1M+ requests per second while maintaining 99.99% availability and strong consistency guarantees for critical financial and pricing flows.
• Drive technical strategy for platform evolution, microservices architecture, and API design to simplify integration for new lines of business and third-party partners.
• Build platform abstractions and developer tools that hide massive underlying complexity, enabling ML and product teams to iterate rapidly on core algorithms.
• Spearhead architectural transitions toward "Dual-rail" resiliency, ensuring every mission-critical payment or pricing flow has redundant processing options to maximize reliability.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Data Science, and Ops at the Director and VP levels to translate commercial requirements into scalable, hardened platform solutions.
• Own technical excellence by driving architecture reviews, identifying and reducing systemic technical debt, and raising the bar for observability and incident response across the organization.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in backend development and building world-class distributed systems in large-scale production environments.
• Proven ability to solve strategically important problems by leading organization-wide development and adoption of key frameworks and coding best practices.
• Experience foreseeing architectural problems or opportunities a year in advance and working with leadership to address them before they impact the business.
• Demonstrated track record of leading large-scale engineering projects through all lifecycle stages, from inception and requirement gathering to global productionization.
• Expertise in defining standards for testing, monitoring, and alerting systems, while overseeing the execution of complex incident management at an organizational level.
• Proven experience in identifying architectural gaps and creating org-wide frameworks that improve developer velocity and reduce systemic technical debt.
• Demonstrated leadership in building strategic relationships with internal stakeholders and external partners to rally an organization around a technical vision.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expert-level proficiency in Go, Java, or Python with experience in real-time marketplace platforms requiring high consistency and global reliability.
• Experience building hardened developer tools, SDKs, and abstractions (e.g., streaming data with Flink/Kafka) used by hundreds of engineers.
• Proficiency in cloud-native infrastructure (GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes) at a massive global scale.
• Strategic architecture mindset: Ability to balance near-term execution with long-lasting engineering artifacts that improve reliability within an organization.
• Experience as a technical brand ambassador, serving as a representative for the organization to the broader internal and external technical community.