Sr Software Engineer, Ad Serving
Role summary
The Ad Serving Infrastructure team is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to lead critical initiatives focused on reducing latency and maximizing availability within Uber's core ad serving path. This role involves architecting foundational capabilities to unify diverse ad surfaces and complex demand constraints, directly enabling next-generation scalable advertising products. Responsibilities include designing low-latency infrastructure, developing reliability metrics, conducting performance deep-dives to meet sub-20ms goals, building reusable abstractions, and championing operational excellence through DR audits. The ideal candidate possesses 5+ years of software engineering experience with expertise in Java, Go, or C++, and a proven track record in architecting large-scale distributed systems with high availability and ultra-low latency requirements.
About the Role
The Ad Serving Infrastructure team provides the high-performance backbone that allows Uber's product teams to innovate rapidly with minimal operational toil. As a Senior Engineer, you will lead mission-critical initiatives to drastically reduce latency and maximize availability on the core ad serving path. You will architect foundational capabilities that unify diverse ad surfaces and complex demand constraints, directly enabling the next generation of scalable advertising products across the Uber ecosystem.
What the You'll Do
- Lead the design and implementation of low-latency infrastructure, including in-memory signal caching and ad platform consolidations.
- Drive the development of sophisticated reliability metrics (e.g., Error Free Rate) to capture system degradation and more accurately gauge ad serving health.
- Conduct latency deep-dives and system profiling to achieve aggressive sub-20ms goals for core ad serving paths.
- Collaborate with product and delivery teams to build reusable abstractions that minimize toil and accelerate engineering velocity.
- Champion operational excellence by performing DR audits and documenting risks to ensure long-term platform resilience.
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience in software engineering
- Expertise in Java, Go, or C++ with a deep understanding of concurrent programming and high-performance backend system design.
- Proven experience architecting and maintaining large-scale distributed systems where high availability (99.99%) and ultra-low latency are primary requirements.
- Demonstrated ability to perform performance profiling and deep-dives into complex systems to identify and mitigate latency hotspots and bottlenecks.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior experience in the AdTech domain, particularly with ad exchanges, bidders, or real-time auction engines.
- Hands-on experience with real-time data technologies such as Apache Pinot and Kafka to build advanced monitoring and troubleshooting tools.
- Experience leading Disaster Recovery (DR) audits and exercises to identify and mitigate catastrophic platform risks.
A background in building reusable service abstractions and frameworks that significantly improve developer velocity across multiple teams
For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$202,000 per year - USD$224,000 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.
Sample Uber interview questions
- 1
Design a truck tracking system that supports filtering by truck number and includes an interface
system designmedium - 2
Design Uber Eats
system designmedium - 3
Given a sorted array of integers (which may include negatives), return the squares of the numbers
codingmedium - 4
Find the minimum characters to insert to make a string a palindrome
codingmedium - 5
Given an array of integers and a number N, find the length of the longest contiguous subarray such
codingmedium
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