Sr. Staff Engineer (GenAI)
About the Role
Uber’s Customer Obsession team builds the platform and AI that powers world‑class support across mobile, web, and voice at global scale. We are now hiring a Senior Staff Engineer to architect, productionize, and scale an autonomous support agent that resolves customer issues end‑to‑end. Experience with agentic architectures is an important pre-requisite to be successful in this role. You’ll push the state of the art in GenAI for customer service—LLM orchestration, evaluation, safety guardrails, multilingual support, and real‑time voice—while holding a very high bar for reliability and cost efficiency. We are still at an early stage and value candidates with bias for action who get creative with GenAI tools to accelerate execution and experimentation.
What the Candidate Will Need / Bonus Points
---- What the Candidate Will Do ----
- Own the end‑to‑end agent architecture: agentic planning and execution loops, long-term memory, persona/voice, knowledge routing, and policy enforcement for compliant, on‑brand conversations.
- Ship production systems that handle millions of conversations with rigorous SLOs, fallbacks, and canaries; design graceful degradation (e.g., human handoff) and safety guardrails (prompt‑injection, jailbreak, PII redaction).
- Advance retrieval & reasoning: Build next-generation retrieval and reasoning pipelines, where the agent can search across different knowledge sources, apply policy-driven tools, and call structured workflows and ensure that responses are consistently grounded.
- Establish evals that matter: offline rubrics, simulated scenarios, safety tests, cost/latency tradeoff suites, and LLM‑as‑judge (with calibrated human review) wired into CI/CD and experiment platforms.
- Drive automation at scale: partner with Product/Design/Operations on coverage, policy alignment, localization, and rollout strategy to better customer experience and reduce cost per contact.
- Mentor/principal‑lead multiple pods; set technical strategy and quality bars; coach senior engineers on agentic patterns, reliability, and experiment velocity.
---- Basic Qualifications ----
- 10+ years building production ML/AI systems; 4+ years leading complex ML initiatives end‑to‑end.
- Deep expertise in LLM‑driven systems (inference optimization, prompt/program design, fine‑tuning, distillation/LoRA, safety/guardrails, evals).
- Strong software engineering in Python plus one of Go/Java/C++; hands‑on with microservices, gRPC/HTTP, cloud infra, containers, CI/CD, and real‑time telemetry/observability.
- Demonstrated ownership of high‑availability services (SLO/SLA design, incident response, on‑call leadership, postmortems).
- Track record of shipping customer‑facing intelligent experiences with measurable impact (A/B testing, metrics literacy).
---- Preferred Qualifications ----
- Agentic architectures in production (planner/executor, memory, multi‑step reasoning) and RAG over complex, policy‑heavy knowledge bases.
- Experience building support automation for large consumer platforms (routing, policy codification, internal tooling, co‑pilot/auto‑resolve).
- Multilingual NLU/NLG (code‑switching, low‑resource languages), hallucination mitigation, safety red‑teaming, and privacy‑by‑design.
- Practical expertise balancing speed and reliability at scale: experiment frameworks, feature flags, canary/guarded rollouts, and clear kill‑switches.
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.
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
- 10+ years building production ML or AI systems
- 4+ years leading complex ML initiatives end-to-end
- Deep expertise in LLM-driven systems, including inference optimization, prompt or program design, fine-tuning, distillation or LoRA, safety guardrails, and evaluations
- Strong software engineering skills in Python plus one of Go, Java, or C++
- Hands-on experience with microservices, gRPC or HTTP, cloud infrastructure, containers, CI/CD, and real-time telemetry or observability
- Experience owning high-availability services, including SLO/SLA design, incident response, on-call leadership, and postmortems
- Track record of shipping customer-facing intelligent experiences with measurable impact, including A/B testing and metrics literacy
- Production experience with agentic architectures and RAG over complex, policy-heavy knowledge bases
- Experience building support automation for large consumer platforms
- Experience with multilingual NLU/NLG, hallucination mitigation, safety red-teaming, and privacy-by-design
- Expertise balancing speed and reliability at scale using experiment frameworks, feature flags, canary or guarded rollouts, and kill-switches
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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