Senior Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

At Uber, our mission is to reimagine how people move and transact in the world. We're seeking a Senior Staff Backend Engineer (L6) to join our Payments Experience (PEX) organization to define and execute the technical strategy for our core payment processing and experience platform.

This role is for a proven, large-scale systems thinker who will drive the architecture and implementation of highly available, reliable, and cost-efficient backend services that power billions in global transactions.

As a technical leader, you'll define the future of backend software engineering within Payments Experience. You will be a key peer to mobile and frontend leaders, translating product vision into a scalable and performant reality, and your contributions will directly impact Uber's profitability and the lives of millions of users worldwide.

What the Candidate Will Need / Bonus Points
- What the Candidate Will Do -

You will act as a technical leader across the Payments Experience domain, focusing on the core platform components that enable frictionless experiences for Spenders and Earners.

Backend Engineering Excellence & Reliability

• Strategic System Design: Design and lead the implementation of backend systems that support strategically critical PEX initiatives, such as Unified Checkout and Payment Method Gateway.
• Raise the Bar in System Resiliency: Design and implement highly available and resilient backend services across geographies and payment methods. Define the standards and raise the bar in testing, monitoring, and alerting systems, and lead the organization to execute against them
• Incident Leadership & Observability: Oversee and improve incident response processes (e.g. TTD and TTM) for critical backend services. Drive the adoption of advanced observability and dynamic alerting to proactively detect and mitigate issues.
• Technical Debt & Performance: Proactively identify and reduce technical debt across core payment systems (e.g., migrating long-tail configurations to centralized config systems), focusing on low-latency, high-throughput service optimization.

System Architecture & Platform Strategy

• Partner Independence: Spearhead the architectural evolution to achieve Dual-rail Everything-ensuring every critical payment flow (e.g., 3DS, Instant Pay) has more than one processing option to increase reliability, reduce cost, and enable Smart Routing and retries without user action.
• Externalization and Integration: Define the backend strategy to simplify integration of the Payments stack for new Lines of Business (LoBs) and third-party partners (3P), making it "as easy and as powerful as integrating with Stripe or Adyen".
• Payments Evolution: Lead the technical design for complex, modern payment models like deferred, delegated, and partial payments, ensuring they are first-class citizens in the Checkout and Payment Selection stacks.
• New Capabilities: Guide the technical trajectory for solving anticipatory problems, such as defining new frameworks for Session Resilience & Recovery and Arrears Consolidation that improve payment success rates across all LoBs.

Collaboration and Technical Leadership

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Risk Engineers to balance competing priorities and drive high-impact engineering projects from inception to production.
• Mentorship and Coaching: Set the bar for technical quality. Provide high-quality code and design review feedback, and actively mentor peers on complex distributed systems, coding best practices, and Uber's engineering frameworks.
• Influence and Alignment: Act as a spokesperson for the PEX technical community, influencing technical direction across your organization and with external stakeholders (like the Risk team on Auth Hold orchestration or 2FA friction (3DS)).
• Leadership: You will lead charters and sometimes end-to-end projects.

Example Projects You Might Lead

• Payment Method Gateway: Drive the complete backend migration of large card processors and disbursement partners to PMG, ensuring partner independence for critical flows like 3DS.
• Advanced Smart Routing: Lead the development of intelligent routing and retries capabilities to pick the 'best' route for a payment, maximizing success rates and minimizing processing costs in real-time.
• Core Services Bridging: Develop the backend systems strategy to prevent divergence of the payments stack as new lines of business pursue specialized client visions.

• Arrears Consolidation: Architect a standalone, versatile arrears capability that simplifies recovery paths for users and allows flexible payment-back options for Earners.

• Basic Qualifications -

You are a Senior Staff Engineer and a seasoned expert in distributed backend systems who solves complex, large-scale problems with both engineering prowess and a deep understanding of the human and commercial context.

• Expert Backend Technologist: You have extensive experience in backend development (typically 10+ years), with a proven ability to design, build, and scale world-class high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems.
• Cross-team collaboration, mentoring, and influencing technical direction across an organization.
• Strategic Visionary: You align architectural decisions with broader organizational goals, such as maximizing conversion (iGB) while maintaining compliance and security.
• Language Proficiency: Highly efficient coding in Golang, Java, or similar equivalent languages.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills: with the ability to articulate complex technical ideas to technical and non-technical audiences. This is especially important in the age of AI.

• Preferred Qualifications -

• AI Proficiency: At Uber, we're an AI-first company and use various AI tools (both in-house and commercial) to augment our productivity.

• Data-Driven Owner: Deep experience with A/B experimentation frameworks and practices, with the ability to reason beyond simple green/red metrics to interpret and implement solutions that drive long-term impact.