Sr Staff Engineer, Backend - Core Services

**About The Role** As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer in Core Services, you are a technical anchor for the foundational systems that power every Uber trip, delivery, and transaction globally. Your scope extends beyond a single team; you will define the 2\-3 year technical vision for Uber's backend ecosystem. You will be responsible for the health, scalability, and evolution of our most critical infrastructure\-Identity, Payments, and Safety\-ensuring they remain resilient as we scale to the next 100 million users. You will act as a peer to Directors and VPs, providing the technical grounding for Uber's most ambitious business goals. **What You'll Do** * Define the North Star: Lead the creation of a multi\-year technical roadmap for Core Services, ensuring our architecture handles 10x growth while reducing systemic complexity. * Architectural Governance: Serve as a key member of the Architecture Review Board, setting standards for how backend services are built, deployed, and interconnected company\-wide. * Buy vs. Build: Lead high\-stakes evaluations for foundational technologies (databases, orchestration, messaging) that have long\-term financial and operational impact. **Systems Transformation \& Excellence** * Solve the "Impossible": Directly tackle the most ambiguous, high\-risk technical challenges that represent significant single points of failure for the company. * Institutionalize Reliability: Drive a company\-wide shift toward "Zero\-Trust" and "Always\-On" architectures, re\-engineering the platform to make entire classes of failures impossible. * Efficiency at Scale: Lead initiatives to optimize infrastructure spend and resource utilization across tens of thousands of nodes without compromising performance. **Cross\-Functional \& Industry Influence** * Strategic Advisory: Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership (VP/CTO level), translating complex technical trade\-offs into business risks and opportunities. * Ecosystem Leadership: Represent Uber in the broader tech community (open source, conferences, standards bodies), positioning Uber's engineering as an industry gold standard. * Culture Carrier: Champion quality and long\-term thinking, modeling Uber's core values of "Go Get It" and "Build with Heart." **Mentorship of Leaders** * Leader of Leaders: Focus mentorship on Staff Engineers and Engineering Managers, helping them grow into organizational leaders and strategic thinkers. * Sponsor Excellence: Identify and sponsor high\-potential talent, ensuring a diverse and robust pipeline of future technical leaders. **Minimum Qualifications** * 15\+ years of professional experience in backend software engineering, with a proven track record of delivering massive\-scale distributed systems. * History of Org\-Wide Impact: Demonstrated ability to lead technical transformations that affect hundreds of engineers and multiple business units. * Deep Mastery of Distributed Theory: Expert\-level understanding of CAP theorem trade\-offs, consensus algorithms (Paxos/Raft), and global data consistency models. * Exceptional Communication: Ability to explain deep technical concepts to non\-technical executives and build consensus across conflicting organizational priorities. ****Preferred Qualifications**** * Open Source Contribution: Significant contributions to major open\-source projects in the infrastructure or distributed systems space. * Vertical Expertise: Deep experience in FinTech (Payments) or Identity/Security at a global "Big Tech" scale. * Future\-Proofing: Experience migrating monolithic architectures to highly modular, cell\-based, or serverless paradigms at scale.