Staff Applied Scientist - Observability

Uber Uber · Consumer · Amsterdam, Netherlands · Data Science

Uber is seeking an experienced Applied Scientist to build a real-time data platform for customer experience observability and analytics. The role involves designing and improving anomaly detection and alerting for multivariate time series, building methods to reduce incident impact, and contributing to intelligent incident response workflows. It also includes developing statistical monitoring for code deployment and feature rollout safety, and enabling analytics through data infrastructure. The scientist will define success metrics for incident detection systems and create evaluation harnesses. This is a high-impact role collaborating with engineering to drive an ambitious observability platform.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design and improve state-of-the-art anomaly detection and alerting for multivariate time series metrics.
  2. Build methods to reduce incident impact, such as by shortening incident time-to-detection and time-to-resolution while reducing alert fatigue (deduplication, correlation, grouping, etc).
  3. Contribute to intelligent incident response workflows: auto-triage to right team, suspected root-cause hints, auto-mitigation actions as well as agentic mitigation flows (supporting on-call Engineers in debugging and mitigating).
  4. Develop statistical monitoring approaches for code deployment safety and feature rollout safety (e.g. near-real-time sequential A/B testing, before/after system degradation detection, etc).
  5. Define success metrics for incident detection systems (precision, recall, time to detect, coverage, etc) and create evaluation harnesses using historical incidents and annotated alerts.

Skills

Required

  • M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Operations Research, Economics, or another quantitative field.
  • 6+ years of proven experience as an Applied Scientist, Machine Learning Scientist/Engineer, Research Scientist, or equivalent.
  • Strong expertise in causal inference / experimentation, including designing, executing, and analyzing A/B tests; experience with related methodologies (e.g., quasi-experimental designs, uplift/heterogeneous treatment effects) is highly valued.
  • Strong expertise in anomaly detection and time-series analysis, with hands-on experience building production-grade, scalable detection and alerting pipelines for large-scale, real-time systems (including time-series feature engineering, modeling, monitoring, and drift/seasonality handling).
  • Experience in production coding and deployment of ML, statistical, causal, and/or optimization models in real-time or near-real-time systems (end-to-end: data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration).
  • Ability to use Python (or similar languages) to work efficiently at scale with large datasets in production environments; strong software engineering fundamentals (testing, reliability, performance).
  • Proficiency in SQL and distributed data processing (e.g. PySpark, Flink SQL).
  • Excellent communication skills in cross-functional settings, with demonstrated ability to translate business/system problems into technical solutions and influence stakeholders.
  • Thought leadership and ownership to drive multi-functional initiatives from conceptualization through productionization, including setting technical direction and raising the quality bar.

Nice to have

  • Experience with real-time or near-real-time pipelines and large-scale data systems (e.g., Spark, streaming, Kafka-like systems, OLAP stores).
  • Experience in observability, user analytics, experimentation platforms, or reliability monitoring.
  • Familiarity with event correlation and change attribution (e.g., linking regressions to code/config/feature flag changes).
  • Experience building tools that improve workflow quality (onboarding, annotation, diagnosis dashboards).

What the JD emphasized

  • state-of-the-art anomaly detection
  • production-grade, scalable detection and alerting pipelines
  • real-time or near-real-time systems
  • causal inference / experimentation
  • A/B tests
  • anomaly detection and time-series analysis

Other signals

  • anomaly detection
  • time-series analysis
  • A/B testing
  • observability
  • production ML systems