Principal Engineer - Maps

About the Role

Principal engineers at Uber have a deep impact across a wide variety of business and technology decisions spanning multiple programs, projects and locations. They are passionate and pragmatic technologists who are able to design and architect highly-available, secure scalable and resilient systems while delivering efficient code. They are not only collaborative role models, but also approachable leaders with a point of view within a larger group.  They are humble teachers, technically mentoring a team of passionate engineers while also delivering uniquely challenging projects. A Principal-level Engineering role at Uber is special, representing  the top 2% of Engineers at Uber.

The Maps team is looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer that will lead the technical vision, architecture, and delivery of Uber’s GeoSearch platform. GeoSearch powers how users discover, interpret, and retrieve places, points-of-interest, and addresses across our platform, including powering the ‘Where to?’ auto-complete search experience on Uber’s Mobility App landing page. The MapSearch platform sits at the core of critical product experiences, combining large-scale retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and real-time serving to deliver highly relevant results under strict latency constraints. This is a  unique opportunity to solve deep technical challenges and have a broad impact across Uber’s business.

What You’ll Do

• Define the Vision: Translate ambiguous long-term business needs into long-term technical strategy and roadmap, ensuring Uber’s GeoSearch architecture scales with evolving product needs and global traffic demands
• Evaluate and Execute on New Solutions: Lead the design and implementation of novel systems that leverage search query understanding, retrieval, ranking, personalization and recommendation to drive session conversion and delightful experiences for our Riders, Eaters, and Earners
• Drive Business Impact: Go beyond ideation — ensure that the solutions you deliver produce measurable, step-change improvements in key metrics such as Mobility session conversion and cross-sell from Mobility to Delivery
• Lead Strategic Initiatives: Spearhead complex, cross-functional efforts that require deep technical influence, alignment across multiple engineering organizations, and strong partnership with product, science, and operations leadership
• Innovate at Scale: Design and evolve globally distributed real-time search systems that operate reliably as Uber rapidly scales its business and its product offerings
• Teach and Grow the team: ​​Mentor senior engineers and staff engineers; develop technical leadership across the organization

What You’ll Need

• BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience
• A minimum of 10 years of relevant software engineering experience, with a proven record of technical leadership and innovation
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with sustained hands-on technical leadership
• Strong expertise in distributed systems operating under strict latency, availability, and throughput requirements
• Deep experience building and operating large-scale search systems, including retrieval, ranking, indexing, and serving architecture from ambiguous problem definition through production adoption
• Experience with Java, Go or C++ (bonus points for more than one)
• Experience influencing and aligning senior leadership (Director, VP level) on technical strategy and roadmaps

Bonus Points If

• Advanced degree in Computer Science or related field
• Experience working in the Maps/Geo domain, particularly geospatial search, location-based retrieval, or place semantic understanding
• Experience building search systems that integrate with agentic workflows
• Familiarity with experimentation systems for search quality measurement

About the Team

The Maps team builds global-scale GeoSpatial solutions (Location Search, Pickups, Dropoffs, Routing, Navigation, Traffic, etc) that power backend optimization systems, core products and user experiences across Uber’s Rides and Delivery businesses.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$302,000 per year - USD$336,000 per year.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$302,000 per year - USD$336,000 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.

Uber's mission is to reimagine the way the world moves for the better. Here, bold ideas create real-world impact, challenges drive growth, and speed fuels progress. What moves us, moves the world - let's move it forward, together.

Uber is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.

Offices continue to be central to collaboration and Uber’s cultural identity. Unless formally approved to work fully remotely, Uber expects employees to spend at least half of their work time in their assigned office. For certain roles, such as those based at green-light hubs, employees are expected to be in-office for 100% of their time. Please speak with your recruiter to better understand in-office expectations for this role.