Staff Software Engineer, Uber Eats Search Experience

About the Role

Search is a primary discovery surface in Uber Eats that drives over a third of our business. We’re on a mission to evolve search from a simple query box into an adaptive, intuitive experience that better understands user intent and helps people confidently decide what to order.

The Search Experience team owns the presentation layer for Search: how users express intent and how results are displayed, measured, and iterated across global and in-store search. We build rich experiences using embedded web technology inside the Eats iOS/Android apps, with strict performance and reliability requirements. These experiences are powered by backend services and clean contracts that enable rapid iteration.

We partner closely with Ranking/Relevance teams (who own retrieval and ML ranking). Our focus is turning their signals into fast, trustworthy, and high-converting user experiences, while modernizing foundations (performance, instrumentation, experimentation, and developer velocity). Natural Language Search (NLS) is a major investment area, and we’re building the presentation layer that makes NLS feel transparent, controllable, and reliable.

What You Will Do

1. Lead ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives spanning UX, engineering, and measurement, turning broad goals into milestones, guardrails, and shippable increments.
2. Own meaningful end-to-end slices across the presentation path, including the contracts between client and server and the systems that power them.
3. Set technical direction for performance, reliability, experimentation readiness, and observability across Search presentation surfaces.
4. Reduce recurring failure modes by improving foundations: rollout safety, regression prevention, instrumentation quality, and developer velocity.
5. Partner deeply with PM, Design, UXR, Data Science, and Ranking/Relevance to align on user intent, trust, and measurable outcomes.
6. Multiply the team through mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and reusable patterns that make others faster.

---- Basic Qualifications ----

1. Scale + Reliability: Built and operated consumer-facing products at scale, with strong instincts for latency, availability, and regression risk.
2. Experimentation + Measurement: Comfortable using A/B tests and data to drive decisions; able to define success metrics, guardrails, and measurement plans.
3. End-to-End Ownership: Can drive work across client and server boundaries, including API design, rollout strategy, and production debugging.
4. Product Craft: Experience building high-performance, reliable user-facing (web) experiences; comfortable debugging rendering, networking, and runtime behavior in production.
5. Leadership through Influence: Ability to lead ambiguous, cross-functional projects by creating alignment and momentum without relying on authority.
6. Communication: Strong written and verbal communication; able to turn ambiguity into clear plans and crisp decisions.
7. Engineering Judgment: High bar for quality and pragmatism; knows when to simplify and when a foundational investment is worth it.

---- Preferred Qualifications ----

1. Direct experience with Search, Recommendations, Ranking-adjacent systems, or large-scale discovery products.
2. History of successfully leading complex, cross-functional projects and thriving in ambiguity and autonomy.
3. Strong distributed systems understanding and practical experience building highly available, low-latency services at scale.
4. Data-driven approach with comfort digging into metrics and funnels to diagnose drop-offs and validate impact.
5. High bar for product craft: appreciation for how performance and small UX details shape user behavior, trust, and conversion.
6. Excited about the “Inspiration and Discovery” direction and motivated to build experiences that meaningfully improve how people explore and decide.
7. Interest in NLS and building presentation-layer experiences that make intelligent systems feel transparent and reliable (without needing to build the ML models).

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$232,000 per year - USD$258,000 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.

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.