Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Uber Uber · Consumer · Sunnyvale, CA · Engineering

Staff Software Engineer to define and scale Uber's AI-powered customer engagement platform, focusing on conversational assistants. This role involves setting technical vision, leading initiatives for GenAI assistants, owning platform components like orchestration and guardrails, and driving cross-org alignment for production-ready implementations at scale. Requires expertise in large-scale distributed systems and experience with GenAI/LLM systems in production.

What you'd actually do

  1. Set the technical vision and architecture for next-generation conversational assistants, influencing roadmaps across multiple teams and partner orgs
  2. 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)
  3. Own critical platform components (not just individual bots): frameworks, tooling, orchestration, observability, guardrails, and scalable backend services that enable consistent experiences across channels
  4. Drive cross-org alignment and execution, identifying ecosystem gaps, defining interfaces/standards, and building consensus to deliver production-ready implementations at scale
  5. Solve complex distributed systems and operational challenges under heavy traffic, raising the bar on reliability, performance, and operational excellence

Skills

Required

  • 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)
  • 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
  • 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

Nice to have

  • 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 experiences across channels

What the JD emphasized

  • production-grade systems
  • GenAI/LLM-based systems in production
  • conversational platforms

Other signals

  • AI-powered customer engagement platforms
  • millions of real-time interactions
  • state-of-the-art AI
  • personalized, empathetic, and human-like conversational experiences
  • LLM prompting/agent design
  • GenAI assistants
  • conversational platforms