Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform

Uber; United States; On-site; USD 232,000 - 258,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Bonus program

Equity

401(k)

Benefits

Job summary

Uber's Search Platform team is building the next generation of scalable, intelligent retrieval infrastructure to power critical business apps and AI workloads. Staff Software Engineer candidates will tackle distributed systems challenges at Uber scale, shaping indexing and retrieval across the ecosystem.

You'll design high-performance search systems, advance lexical/semantic/vector/hybrid search, and enable agentic AI features while optimizing throughput and latency, collaborating across teams

Qualifications

• 8+ years in professional software engineering for large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems architecture, concurrency, and performance.
• Proficiency in Java, Go, Rust or C++.
• Proven track record leading cross-team initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable, low-latency distributed search systems.
• Advance lexical, semantic, vector, and hybrid search capabilities.
• Enable AI-native and agentic applications on the platform.
• Optimize indexing throughput and query latency.
• Tackle problems in indexing, storage, query execution, scalability.
• Contribute to platform architecture and strategic direction.
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams across Uber.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend languages

Technical leadership

High availability

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Lucene

Vector search

Job description

About the role and team

Uber's Search Platform team builds and operates the foundational search infrastructure powering critical business applications and services. Our platform supports a diverse and rapidly evolving set of workloads, spanning lexical search, semantic and vector search, observability and emerging agentic AI applications.

We are looking for a passionate Staff Software Engineer to help us build the next generation of Search Platform—a highly scalable, reliable, cost-efficient, and intelligent retrieval infrastructure designed to meet the demands of both traditional search and AI-native workloads.

You will have the opportunity to solve challenging distributed systems problems at Uber scale, push the boundaries of modern search technologies, and shape the future of how data is indexed, retrieved, and consumed across Uber's ecosystem.

What you’ll do

• Build next-generation search infrastructure: Design and develop highly scalable, low-latency, and reliable distributed search systems that power Uber's critical business applications.
• Advance search and retrieval capabilities: Develop and optimize lexical, semantic, vector, and hybrid search capabilities to support increasingly complex retrieval workloads.
• Enable AI-native and agentic applications: Evolve the search platform to support emerging AI and agentic workloads, including intelligent retrieval, contextual search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Drive performance and efficiency: Optimize indexing throughput, query latency, resource utilization, and infrastructure costs across large-scale distributed systems.
• Solve complex engineering challenges: Tackle problems involving distributed indexing, storage architecture, query execution, data freshness, scalability, and system reliability.
• Shape platform architecture and strategy: Contribute to technical direction and architectural decisions that enable the platform to evolve with Uber's growing business and AI needs.
• Collaborate across teams/organizations: Partner with engineering and product teams to understand diverse search requirements and deliver reusable, high-impact platform capabilities.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems architecture, concurrency, data structures, algorithms, and performance optimization.
• Proficiency in one or more systems or backend programming languages, such as Java, Go, Rust or C++.
• Proven track record of architecting and delivering complex, production-grade infrastructure systems with high availability and scalability requirements.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically ambiguous, cross-team initiatives from architecture and design through execution and production adoption.
• Strong technical judgment, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence engineering direction across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, or large-scale proprietary search systems.
• Deep expertise in search engines and information retrieval systems, including Apache Lucene, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or similar technologies.
• Strong understanding of indexing architectures, inverted indexes, query execution, relevance ranking, and distributed search systems.
• Experience with vector search algorithms, such as HNSW, IVF, or other large-scale similarity search techniques.
• Familiarity with semantic search, hybrid retrieval, embedding-based retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic AI architectures.
• Experience designing storage and compute architectures for large-scale, data-intensive systems, including compute-storage disaggregation, tiered storage, or distributed indexing.
• Proven ability to drive substantial improvements in infrastructure efficiency, query latency, indexing throughput, or system reliability.
• Experience evaluating emerging technologies and translating research or industry advancements into practical, production-grade infrastructure.
• Track record of technical leadership, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing architectural direction across multiple engineering teams.

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.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.

For all US locations, you will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.