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.