{"id":2571417,"url":"https://alion.io/job/uber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform","title":"Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform","company":{"id":230,"name":"Uber","domain":"uber.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/uber","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Oracle","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":93,"open_postings":123,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.455,"repost_share":0.057,"time_to_fill_p50_days":8,"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":232000,"max":258000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":258000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Hybrid Search","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Solr","optional":true},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-12T21:59:16Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-12","last_verified_at":"2026-10-15T07:00:16Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":2,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":2},"description":"About the role and team\nUber'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.\nWe 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.\nYou 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.\nWhat you’ll do\nBuild next-generation search infrastructure: Design and develop highly scalable, low-latency, and reliable distributed search systems that power Uber's critical business applications.\nAdvance search and retrieval capabilities: Develop and optimize lexical, semantic, vector, and hybrid search capabilities to support increasingly complex retrieval workloads.\nEnable 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).\nDrive performance and efficiency: Optimize indexing throughput, query latency, resource utilization, and infrastructure costs across large-scale distributed systems.\nSolve complex engineering challenges: Tackle problems involving distributed indexing, storage architecture, query execution, data freshness, scalability, and system reliability.\nShape 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.\nCollaborate across teams/organizations: Partner with engineering and product teams to understand diverse search requirements and deliver reusable, high-impact platform capabilities.\nBasic Qualifications\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.\n8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems.\nStrong expertise in distributed systems architecture, concurrency, data structures, algorithms, and performance optimization.\nProficiency in one or more systems or backend programming languages, such as Java, Go, Rust or C++.\nProven track record of architecting and delivering complex, production-grade infrastructure systems with high availability and scalability requirements.\nDemonstrated ability to lead technically ambiguous, cross-team initiatives from architecture and design through execution and production adoption.\nStrong technical judgment, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence engineering direction across teams.\nPreferred Qualifications\nHands-on experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Solr, Lucene, or large-scale proprietary search systems.\nDeep expertise in search engines and information retrieval systems, including Apache Lucene, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or similar technologies.\nStrong understanding of indexing architectures, inverted indexes, query execution, relevance ranking, and distributed search systems.\nExperience with vector search algorithms, such as HNSW, IVF, or other large-scale similarity search techniques.\nFamiliarity with semantic search, hybrid retrieval, embedding-based retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic AI architectures.\nExperience designing storage and compute architectures for large-scale, data-intensive systems, including compute-storage disaggregation, tiered storage, or distributed indexing.\nProven ability to drive substantial improvements in infrastructure efficiency, query latency, indexing throughput, or system reliability.\nExperience evaluating emerging technologies and translating research or industry advancements into practical, production-grade infrastructure.\nTrack record of technical leadership, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing architectural direction across multiple engineering teams.\n For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.\nFor Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year.\nFor 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":4896,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":true},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Delivery","Ride Hailing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-14T23:01:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":87,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.871,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":8,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-15T05:46:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":258000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/uber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/uber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-15T07:09:23Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":10823,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-16T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":230},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=230"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fuber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fuber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fuber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/uber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fuber-staff-software-engineer-search-platform"}]}