Sr Staff Engineer, Java Platform

About the Role

Uber’s Developer Platform Organization is looking for a Staff Software Engineer with deep expertise in Java to lead and execute the strategic vision for Uber's next-generation Java platform.

This is a high-impact, company-scoped technical leadership role. You will be responsible for far more than the Java Platform team's roadmap; your mission is to elevate the capabilities of every Java developer at Uber and deepen Uber's engagement with the broader Java open-source community.

You will set the technical direction for modernizing one of the world's largest Java monorepos. This includes accelerating developer velocity, significantly reducing operational costs, and providing Storage, Search, and Data teams with the essential runtime and tooling primitives needed to push open-source boundaries on Uber's behalf.

This critical position requires an individual who can operate with significant autonomy and technical depth. You will immediately own foundational platform initiatives, setting the technical direction for projects that impact the entire company. Success hinges on a close partnership with other platform teams and engineering leaders to drive performance, efficiency, reliability, and modernization across Uber's massive Java ecosystem.

---- What the Candidate Will Do ----

1. Set Java Technical Direction: Own the multi-year Java platform roadmap (runtime, build, tooling, AI-assist). Translate future Java features (new JDK, virtual threads, etc.) into concrete adoption plans to boost throughput and cut costs, influencing architecture across thousands of services.
2. Accelerate Java Developer Velocity: Design and ship next-gen platform abstractions (TaskGraph, virtual-thread containers, reactive I/O) and opinionated "golden-path" frameworks (observability, circuit-breakers, AI code generation) to simplify development. Partner with teams to reduce build times, test flakiness, and onboarding friction.
3. Enable Storage, Search & Data with Open Source: Act as Uber's senior liaison to critical Java OSS communities (OpenJDK, Cassandra, Lucene, Kafka, Pinot, Hive/Spark). Identify and address upstream gaps, contribute fixes/features, reduce Uber-specific forks, and establish a structured OSS engagement model (office hours, contribution guidelines, sponsorship, conferences).
4. Drive JVM Performance & Cost Efficiency: Lead benchmarking and continuous profiling to optimize JVM tuning, GC strategy, and frameworks. Quantify cost savings for leadership and champion memory- and CPU-efficient design through guidelines and automated analysis.

Mentor, Grow, and Lead: Mentor Staff/Senior Engineers. Conduct high-quality architecture/design reviews. Represent Java Platform in company-wide forums and build partnerships with leaders (Directors, VPs) and cross-functional teams (Product, Finance, Legal) to align platform investments with business results.

---- Basic Qualifications ----

1. A Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field (or equivalent experience).
2. 10+ years of full-time engineering experience.
3. Demonstrated track record of driving large-scale, cross-organizational technical initiatives from concept through production.
4. Proven ability to influence engineering direction at the organizational level.
5. Systematic problem-solving approach and knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and complexity analysis.
6. Strong understanding of distributed systems or stream processing.
7. Proficient in at least one programming language, such as Golang, Java, C#, or C++.

---- Preferred Qualifications ----

1. 8+ years of experience building and managing large-scale distributed systems.
2. Expert-level Java proficiency, including deep knowledge of the JVM (HotSpot / GraalVM), garbage collectors (G1, ZGC, Shenandoah), and memory model.
3. Hands-on experience with JVM performance tooling: async-profiler, JFR/JMC, heap dump analysis, and continuous profiling pipelines.
4. Direct open-source contribution history — ideally committer or contributor status in OpenJDK or a major Java ecosystem project (Netty, Micronaut, Quarkus, Gradle, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra, Lucene, etc.).
5. Background in Storage, Search, or Data platform engineering — understanding the JVM-rooted operational concerns of systems like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Pinot, or Spark.
6. Strong technical writing and communication skills; ability to produce crisp Engineering Design Documents and present to executive audiences.
7. Leveraging AI/GenAI technologies to streamline engineering workflows, including the automation of routine development tasks and the enhancement of code quality.
8. Great sense of ownership and a proactive bias towards action.

For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$267,000 per year - USD$297,000 per year.

For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD$267,000 per year - USD$297,000 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.