Staff Software Engineer, Backend
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
As a Staff Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of state-of-the-art AI and Uber's production-grade engineering infrastructure-shaping the technical strategy for conversational experiences that are personalized, empathetic, and human-like , while remaining aligned with Uber's business policies, compliance requirements, and reliability standards . This is a high-impact role with broad scope: you'll influence platform direction, accelerate multiple teams, and deliver durable systems that improve customer experiences at global scale., We're looking for a seasoned technical leader who combines deep engineering expertise with strong product intuition. You'll set direction and drive execution for platform-level capabilities that power customer-facing assistants-bringing together LLM prompting/agent design , Uber's assistant-building platforms, and highly reliable distributed systems.
In this role, you will:
- Set the technical vision and architecture for next-generation conversational assistants, influencing roadmaps across multiple teams and partner orgs
- Lead and de-risk large, multi-quarter initiatives , including migrations from legacy NLP systems to GenAI assistants and continued evolution of GenAI capabilities (quality, safety, latency, cost, evaluation)
- Own critical platform components (not just individual bots): frameworks, tooling, orchestration, observability, guardrails, and scalable backend services that enable consistent experiences across channels
- Drive cross-org alignment and execution , identifying ecosystem gaps, defining interfaces/standards, and building consensus to deliver production-ready implementations at scale
- Solve complex distributed systems and operational challenges under heavy traffic, raising the bar on reliability, performance, and operational excellence
- Establish mechanisms to measurably improve outcomes-reducing time-to-resolution, improving containment/CSAT, and scaling automation responsibly
If you enjoy high autonomy and technical depth-and want to multiply impact by enabling many engineers and teams-this role offers meaningful, visible work at global scale.
Requirements
- BS degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
- 8+ years of industry experience as a Software Engineer building scalable, highly available platforms
- Expertise with large-scale distributed systems (e.g., Kafka) and cloud platforms ( AWS, GCP, Azure ) and proven track record leading the delivery of production-grade systems (deployment, monitoring, reliability, on-call readiness, incident learning)
- Proficiency in at least one: Golang, Scala, or Java and comfortable with scripting in JavaScript and/or Python
- Strong experience with microservices and gRPC/REST API design, including defining durable interfaces and platform standards
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills: crisp design docs, architecture reviews, stakeholder alignment, and technical decision-making, * Experience designing and operating GenAI/LLM-based systems in production, including evaluation, prompt/agent iteration loops, and safety/quality guardrails
- Prior experience building conversational platforms (assistant frameworks, orchestration, dialog/state management, tooling) rather than only individual chatbot implementations
- Familiarity with dialog management ecosystems (e.g., Google Dialogflow, Amazon Alexa ) and patterns for multi-turn conversation handling
- Familiarity with multi-channel customer communication surfaces (e.g., WhatsApp, SMS, Slack ) and building consistent experience s across channels
Benefits & conditions
For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$232,000 per year - USD$258,000 per year. 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. More details can be found at the following link https://jobs.uber.com/en/benefits.
