Software Engineer — Delivery Search
About the Role
We are seeking talented Software Engineers to join our Search Engineering team and help build the next generation of AI-powered search experiences across Uber Eats, Grocery, and Retail.
In this role, you will build and improve large-scale backend systems that power search retrieval, ranking, query understanding, and emerging LLM-based search experiences. You will work on high-throughput, low-latency services that retrieve and rank relevant restaurants, stores, dishes, and items from large catalogs in real time.
You will collaborate closely with backend and ML engineers, data scientists, product managers, and platform teams to improve search quality, latency, scalability, and reliability. You will have opportunities to work across traditional search infrastructure, semantic retrieval and machine learning, as well as emerging LLM-powered retrieval, ranking, and search experiences.
About the Team
The Delivery Search team builds the core search technology behind Uber Eats, Grocery, and Retail. We work across the search stack, including query understanding, indexing, lexical and semantic retrieval, ranking, model serving, and search serving infrastructure.
Our work combines large-scale distributed systems, information retrieval, machine learning, and increasingly LLMs and generative AI to solve challenging problems around relevance, latency, scalability, and reliability. The team owns systems serving millions of users and is evolving the search stack toward more intelligent, real-time, and AI-powered architectures.
Basic Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and delivering production systems.
- Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Go, Java, C++, or Python.
- Experience developing backend services, APIs, or distributed systems.
- Understanding of core computer science concepts, including data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and system design.
- Experience writing maintainable, well-tested production code.
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate effectively with engineers and cross-functional partners.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience building scalable, high-throughput, or low-latency backend systems.
- Familiarity with search, recommendation, information retrieval, ranking, or ML-powered systems.
- Familiarity with LLMs, generative AI, or ML model-serving systems and an interest in applying them to large-scale search.
- Experience with embeddings, semantic retrieval, approximate nearest-neighbor search, or vector search.
- Experience building or integrating LLM-powered applications, retrieval/ranking systems, or evaluation pipelines.
- Familiarity with model-serving or inference concepts such as batching, caching, streaming, or latency optimization.
- Experience with search technologies such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Lucene, or similar retrieval systems.
- Familiarity with distributed systems and technologies such as Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, Spark, or Flink.
- Experience with performance optimization, monitoring, observability, and production debugging.
- Experience working on large-scale consumer-facing products.
What the Candidate Will Do
- Build and maintain scalable backend services powering search across Uber Eats, Grocery, and Retail.
- Develop retrieval and ranking systems that help customers find relevant restaurants, stores, dishes, and items.
- Build and productionize LLM- and ML-powered search capabilities, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, and emerging generative search experiences.
- Work with lexical retrieval, semantic retrieval, embeddings, and ML/LLM-based ranking to improve search relevance.
- Partner with ML engineers and data scientists to integrate machine-learned and LLM-based models into production search serving paths.
- Build scalable search serving and indexing infrastructure capable of handling high query volumes and large catalogs.
- Improve system latency, throughput, reliability, and infrastructure efficiency across retrieval, ranking, model serving, and data hydration.
- Contribute to infrastructure supporting efficient model inference, caching, batching, and streaming for latency-sensitive search experiences.
- Analyze search and system performance, debug production issues, and identify opportunities to improve relevance and serving performance.
- Build observability and reliability mechanisms and participate in the operational ownership of production search systems.
- Participate in design and code reviews and contribute to technical decisions for well-scoped projects.
- Write clean, reliable, well-tested, and maintainable production code.
- Collaborate with Product, Data Science, ML, and other engineering teams to ship customer-facing search improvements.
For San Francisco, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $171,000 per year - USD $190,000 per year.
For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $171,000 per year - USD $190,000 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.
About UsReady to Ride?
This isn't the kind of place where you follow a playbook — it's where you help write one. If you're driven by impact, energized by challenge, and ready to shape how the world moves — we'd love to hear from you.
You may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and other compensation, as well as a range of benefits. Explore our benefits.
Offices remain key to collaboration and Uber's culture. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Some roles, like those at greenlight hubs, require full-time in-office presence. Ask your Recruiter for details about this role's requirements.
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.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 2+ years of professional software engineering experience building and delivering production systems
- Proficiency in at least one programming language such as Go, Java, C++, or Python
- Experience developing backend services, APIs, or distributed systems
- Understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, and system design
- Experience writing maintainable, well-tested production code
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to collaborate effectively with engineers and cross-functional partners
- Experience building scalable, high-throughput, or low-latency backend systems
- Familiarity with search, recommendation, information retrieval, ranking, or ML-powered systems
- Familiarity with LLMs, generative AI, or ML model-serving systems
- Experience with embeddings, semantic retrieval, approximate nearest-neighbor search, or vector search
- Experience building or integrating LLM-powered applications, retrieval or ranking systems, or evaluation pipelines
- Familiarity with model-serving or inference concepts such as batching, caching, streaming, or latency optimization
- Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Solr, Vespa, Lucene, or similar retrieval systems
- Familiarity with distributed systems technologies such as Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, Spark, or Flink
- Experience with performance optimization, monitoring, observability, and production debugging
- Experience working on large-scale consumer-facing products
Uber Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Uber and has not been reviewed or approved by Uber.
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Parental & Family Support — Policies provide a minimum of fully paid parental leave for all parents and financial support for fertility, adoption, and surrogacy, with added credits to ease the transition. Programs extend to family medical leave and parenting support resources, indicating depth beyond baseline offerings.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive across many countries, with medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and mental health benefits, plus allowances where direct plans are not available. Wellness programs and reimbursements further reinforce access to care.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Monthly ride and meal credits, free office meals/snacks, fitness stipends, onsite gyms, and wellbeing reimbursements create meaningful everyday value. Home‑office stipends, travel medical coverage, and counseling support round out lifestyle-oriented perks.
Uber Insights
What We Do
We are Uber. The go-getters. The kind of people who are relentless about our mission to help people go anywhere and get anything. Movement is what we do. It’s our lifeblood. It runs through our veins. It’s what gets us out of bed each morning. It pushes us to constantly reimagine how we can move better. For you. For all the places you want to go. For all the things you want to get. For all the ways you want to earn. Across the entire world. In real-time. At the incredible speed of now.
Why Work With Us
We welcome people from all backgrounds who seek the opportunity to help build a future where everyone and everything can move independently. If you have the curiosity, passion, and collaborative spirit, work with us, and let’s move the world forward, together.
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