About the Role
Uber’s Data Platform is the heart of the company’s critical decision-making and AI-driven intelligence. We are evolving from traditional data processing toward a Next-Generation Data Intelligence Platform—a unified, elastic fabric that collapses the silos between batch, streaming, and multimodal data.
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be the architect behind Uber’s Elastic Compute, Unified Semantic Layer, and Self-Evolving Knowledge Platform. You will lead the transition from legacy on-premise systems to a Modern, Cloud-Native Ecosystem, designing solutions that handle exabytes of data. Whether it’s optimizing Transactional Distributed Storage, or operationalizing Agentic Data Intelligence, your work will define the industry standard for high-performance infrastructure.
What You Will Do
- Architect the Multi-Modal Fabric: Unify batch, streaming, and AI compute into one intelligent fabric, enabling real-time insights and trustworthy AI agents at a global scale.
- Revolutionize Storage & Catalog: Drive the architecture for a unified catalog and metadata management service for unstructured data, leveraging native cloud object store capabilities.
- Operationalize AI Intelligence: Partner with teams like QueryCopilot and DataIQ to bridge human validation with autonomous reasoning through agentic workflows.
- Lead Storage Modernization: Evolve our massive-scale persistence layers—including Docstore (Transactional Distributed Storage) and Distributed MySQL—to increase resiliency and reduce operational overhead.
- Open Source & Act as a force multiplier by contributing to the community (Hudi, Iceberg, Presto).
Basic Qualifications ----
- 14+ Years of Engineering Excellence: Proven experience designing and operating world-class distributed data and storage systems.
- Mastery of Storage Internals: Extensive storage experience is a must. You have deep expertise in:
- Batch & Object Storage: HDFS, Cloud Object Storage (S3/GCS/OCI), and Blobstore metadata management.
- Storage Optimization: Practical experience with Apache Hudi or Apache Iceberg for lakehouse architectures.
- Transactional Systems: Experience with distributed transactional storage (e.g., Docstore, Google Spanner, TiDB).
- NoSQL & Cache: Cassandra, Redis, and high-throughput Key-Value stores.
- Data + AI Convergence: Deep understanding of how compute fabrics (Spark, Flink, Ray) integrate with vector databases and model-serving platforms.
- Query Engine Proficiency: Architect-level knowledge of Presto, Trino, or Hive for large-scale analytical processing.
- Systems Programming: Expert-level command of Java, Go, Scala, or C++ with a focus on performance tuning and distributed consensus.
---- Preferred Qualifications ----
- Infrastructure at Scale: Experience designing AI infrastructure, including RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and high-bandwidth data loading for GPUs.
- Distributed Relational Mastery: Hands-on experience with Sharded/Distributed MySQL (Vitess) and managing large-scale tabular data.
- Multi-Cloud Vision: Demonstrated ability to build portable data solutions across OCI and GCP, optimizing for resource efficiency and intelligent scheduling.
- SLA-Driven Reliability: Expertise in building observability, data freshness, and quality frameworks for Tier-0 mission-critical services.
- Strategic Influence: Proven ability to lead platform modernization, mentor Staff-level engineers, and influence long-term technical strategy across multiple organizations.
For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$267,000 per year - USD$297,000 per year.
For Seattle, WA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$267,000 per year - USD$297,000 per year.
For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$267,000 per year - USD$297,000 per year.
For 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. More details can be found at the following link https://jobs.uber.com/en/benefits.
Uber's mission is to reimagine the way the world moves for the better. Here, bold ideas create real-world impact, challenges drive growth, and speed fuels progress. What moves us, moves the world - let's move it forward, together.
Uber is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.
Offices continue to be central to collaboration and Uber's cultural identity. Unless formally approved to work fully remotely, Uber expects employees to spend at least half of their work time in their assigned office. For certain roles, such as those based at green-light hubs, employees are expected to be in-office for 100% of their time. Please speak with your recruiter to better understand in-office expectations for this role.