Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Delivery

About the role and team

Grocery and Retail is one of Uber’s newest and fastest-growing business lines, fundamentally transforming how consumers receive everyday essentials from local stores. As part of the Grocery Fulfillment team, you will design and build the platform-level distributed capabilities that handle a grocery order from the second it is placed until it hits the customer's doorstep. This high-visibility role directly impacts millions of consumers and shoppers globally by preparing our backend infrastructure for 10x scale.

Operating at this scale means wrestling with legacy complexities, high-concurrency systems, and fast-shifting business priorities where textbook answers rarely exist. To thrive here, you must bring a deep sense of ownership, exceptional grit, and a systems-thinking mindset to navigate ambiguity without waiting for perfect information. If you prefer highly predictable roadmaps and neatly defined tasks over the challenge of building a global platform from the ground up, this role may not be the right fit for you.

What you'll do

• Define and drive the 1-2 year technical strategy and global platformization across core backend surfaces, shifting local features into reusable libraries and SDKs.
• Architect and build mission-critical, low-latency distributed infrastructure using Go, Java, or C++ to handle massive concurrency, advanced data sharding, and high-throughput Kafka streaming.
• Serve as an escalation point for severe production incidents, establishing strict latency targets and running blameless post-mortems to eliminate systemic infrastructure gaps.
• Identify opportunities to reduce technical debt and optimize system performance across engineering organizations, balancing short-term feature velocity with long-term architectural health.
• Navigate cross-functional tension and build technical alignment across disparate teams, championing engineering best practices and the principle of disagree and commit.
• Translate highly complex, unstructured business requirements into simple, modular, and extensible system designs without waiting for perfect operational conditions.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on high-concurrency distributed backend systems
• Proven track record of being the technical reference for multiple squads (cross-functional teams)
• Experience with multi-threading, core memory management, and identifying performance bottlenecks like lock contention or memory leaks.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, distributed transactions, and ensuring absolute system idempotency.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical industry experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven background in platformization, specifically building core internal frameworks or shared services that accelerated developer velocity across teams.
• Strong engineering pragmatism with demonstrated judgment handling buy-versus-build trade-offs and managing planned technical debt under high-pressure timelines.
• Experience with large-scale observability and monitoring frameworks to maintain system reliability at global scale.
• Ability to thrive in highly ambiguous environments, leading through technical influence and coaching senior engineers across the organization.