Staff Software Engineer - Engineer

About the role and team

Uber Maps Search helps people find the places and destinations they need across Uber experiences. The multi-disciplinary team builds the backend systems, deep learning models & user experience components behind location search - from understanding a query and retrieving relevant places to serving useful results with the speed and reliability people expect. Because location search is the 1-step of any Go-Get experience at Uber, the team's contributions meaningfully influence Uber’s business performance, and the team’s work is highly visible to the executive leadership team.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll set technical direction for important, multi-quarter initiatives and help evolve the services and data foundations that power search. You’ll partner closely with machine learning, science, mobile, and other engineering teams to turn customer and business needs into scalable systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you’ll shape architecture, guide delivery across teams, and raise the quality and reliability of the platform.

What you’ll do

• Lead the architecture and end-to-end delivery of high-impact Maps Search projects, from problem definition and technical strategy through launch and ongoing operation.
• Design, build, and evolve scalable backend services for location search, including query handling, autocomplete, retrieval, result aggregation, and recommendation-serving workflows.
• Improve the latency, availability, relevance, and operational health of high-throughput search systems, using data and production signals to identify and address bottlenecks.
• Build and maintain dependable data pipelines and serving infrastructure that bring search and machine-learning capabilities into production.
• Make thoughtful system-level tradeoffs across service boundaries, data freshness, quality, cost, and reliability; communicate decisions and establish durable technical direction.
• Partner with product, machine learning, science, mobile, and infrastructure teams to define goals, align dependencies, and deliver cohesive customer experiences.
• Raise the technical bar through design and code reviews, practical engineering standards, and hands-on mentorship of engineers across the organization.
• Strengthen operational excellence through observability, incident follow-up, capacity planning, and improvements to on-call health.

 Basic Qualifications 

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend services or distributed systems.
• Strong programming skills in at least one backend language, such as Java, Go, C++, or Python.
• Demonstrated technical leadership on complex, cross-team projects, including setting architecture and driving delivery from conception to production.
• Experience designing systems for scale, reliability, and low latency, and diagnosing issues in production environments.
• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, API design, and system design.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and work effectively with engineering and non-engineering partners.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building search, information retrieval, ranking, recommendation, or geospatial products.
• Experience with high-QPS, latency-sensitive consumer-facing systems and distributed service architectures.
• Experience building data pipelines, indexes, or online serving systems for machine-learning-powered products.
• Familiarity with search relevance, query understanding, personalization, semantic search, or multi-source retrieval.
• Experience improving production reliability, observability, and operational practices for critical services.
• A track record of influencing technical direction across teams and mentoring senior engineers.
• Graduate degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.