Freight- Meet the Team

Did you know that Uber Freight is made up of five different teams with 150+ engineers globally? Since launching in the U.S. in 2017, Uber Freight has worked to revitalize the trucking industry and bring new opportunities to both carriers and shippers across the country. The inroads we have made in the U.S. are exciting and now have expanded across the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, as well as our North American neighbor, Canada. Celina Ward,  Software Engineer – Freight

What attracted you to join the team?

“Freight presents a unique and interesting problem space because it’s a huge global industry that the economy has depended on for 100+ years, but little attention has been paid to modernize its logistics and reduce overhead in the load lifecycle process. There are exciting opportunities for disruption and innovation with cutting edge technology, while also having the opportunity to empathize and respectfully collaborate with the industry’s veterans. I’ve always found it rewarding to work on problems that have never been solved before — being on the front lines of pioneering technology is exciting!”

What are your career goals at Uber?

“I’m constantly improving software engineering as a fine craft. In the short term, understanding the guts of how Uber Freight’s system behaves to make accurate and timely predictions regarding introducing new changes is imperative to its success. I find it really interesting how Uber Freight’s platform leverages the revolutionary technology Uber ridesharing has already built-in its decade of existence, taking note of what succeeded in the past and what needs additional work and foresight. Taking these lessons, applying them to future architectural designs, and collaborating on high-stakes projects has me excited to grow my career here at Uber.”

What are your biggest achievements in your Uber career to date?

“On this team, I’m pretty proud of designing & launching the architecture for a couple of brand-new features to the freight industry, those being (1) automated express code retrieval and (2) displaying average facility wait times to carriers. It’s rewarding to see collaboration & creativity come to life in the form of real-world impact.”
“I gave a keynote presentation at KubeCon 2018 about putting large-scale stateful workloads in a cloud-native environment — M3DB on Kubernetes. Sharing our progress on the projects we worked on at Uber with the open-source community was a valuable experience for both the M3 team and the technology industry at large.”