Staff Software Engineer Storage, Search, & Data Platforms

The Storage, Search, and Data (SSD) group is the custodian of Uber's digital intelligence. We provide the unified data fabric-from transactional persistence to real-time discovery-that powers every ride, delivery, and autonomous decision made across the planet.
As a Senior Staff Engineer (5B), you will operate as a primary technical architect for the SSD organization. You will be responsible for the technical vision that bridges our on-premise footprint with a Modern, Cloud-Native Data Ecosystem. This role requires a rare blend of deep distributed systems expertise, leading from the front, and the strategic influence to align multiple platform teams toward a unified "Data-to-AI" future.
What You Will Lead

• Strategic Evolution: Define and execute the multi-year roadmap to transition Uber from "Data Storage" to a Cloud-Native Data Provider, solving for cross-region latency, global metadata consistency, and exabyte-scale cost efficiency.
• The AI-Data Convergence: Partner with Uber's AI/ML leadership to architect the "Data-to-GPU" pipeline. You will design the one-stop storage APIs that allow researchers to leverage high-performance data access across multi-cloud regions and vendors seamlessly.
• Platform Innovation: Drive the next generation of our core storage engines: Cassandra (KV store) and Docstore (NoSQL), Vitess (Sharded MySQL), Apache Pinot (Real-time Analytics), LucinePlus and OpenSearch (Search/Discovery).
• You will represent Uber in the global community as a leader in key open source technologies including Apache, Hudi, Iceberg and many others

- Basic Qualifications -

• Industry Leadership: 12+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven history of designing and operating massive-scale distributed data systems.
• Systems Mastery: Elite engineering skills in Go, Java, C++, or Rust. You are comfortable deep-diving into database internals, kernel-level optimizations, and complex distributed consensus protocols.
• Strategic Execution: Proven experience leading technical strategy across multiple teams or organizations, turning high-level business goals into concrete technical realities.
• Operational Excellence: Extensive experience managing Tier-0, mission-critical systems with 99.99% availability and global blast-radius constraints.

- Preferred Qualifications -

- Advanced Academic Background: MS / PhD in Computer Science (or equivalent experience) with a focus on Distributed Systems, Database Internals, or Large-Scale AI Infra.
- Open Source Authority: You are a Maintainer or PMC member of an industry-defining project (e.g., Apache Pinot, Ray, Iceberg, Lance, or Gravitino).
- AI Infrastructure Depth: Deep understanding of modern AI hardware-software interfaces, including GPU memory management, high-bandwidth networking (RDMA/NCCL), and training data pipelines.
- Cloud-Native Visionary: Extensive experience leveraging S3/GCS/OCI to build disaggregated storage-compute architectures that eliminate "stranded" resources and minimize cross-region costs.
Mentorship at Scale: A track record of growing all levels of engineering talent, fostering a culture of technical excellence and scale.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$232,000 per year - USD$258,000 per year. For Seattle, WA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$232,000 per year - USD$258,000 per year. For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$232,000 per year - USD$258,000 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.