Sr Staff Engineer, Mobile

About the role and team 

Engineering at Uber means building for real-world impact under real-world constraints. As a Senior Staff Software Engineer in Rider, you will shape the technical architecture and long-term evolution of the systems that power the Rider experience globally.

Deep mobile architecture expertise will be the anchor for this role, but not its boundary. You will operate across mobile clients, edge capabilities, and backend services, tackling problems spanning application architecture, performance, reliability, server-driven experiences, client-server contracts, and emerging on-device intelligence.

Your impact will extend well beyond the code you write. You will shape how multiple engineering teams build and ship Rider experiences—establishing durable technical foundations, simplifying complex systems, making high-leverage architectural decisions, and enabling teams to move faster without compromising performance, reliability, or quality.

What you’ll do 

• Define the multi-year technical strategy and architecture for Rider experiences across mobile applications, client platforms, edge capabilities, and supporting backend services.
• Set the architectural direction for the Rider application and client platform, enabling multiple teams to independently build and evolve experiences without compromising performance, reliability, or consistency.
• Establish engineering standards and technical foundations across architecture, dependency management, build health, application size, startup and runtime performance, observability, testing, and release quality.
• Architect server-driven and cross-platform experience frameworks, making deliberate trade-offs between native, web-based, shared, and backend-driven implementations.
• Define durable client-server contracts covering API design, schema evolution, backward compatibility, rollout safety, experimentation, offline behavior, and failure recovery.
• Shape the architecture for emerging on-device and edge capabilities, determining what should run on the client versus backend systems while balancing latency, privacy, reliability, battery consumption, and cost.
• Build frameworks, SDKs, developer tools, and reusable abstractions that make it easier for product teams to deliver high-quality Rider experiences without repeatedly solving underlying platform problems.
• Work with Product and Engineering leadership to identify architectural constraints and technical bets that materially expand the set of Rider experiences we can build, and shape investment priorities accordingly.
• Lead major architectural migrations and reduce systemic technical debt, improving engineering velocity, reliability, performance, and product quality across the organization.
• Navigate ambiguous, cross-organizational technical problems where there is no obvious architectural answer; make clear trade-offs, establish alignment, and drive decisions to durable outcomes.
• Stay close to the technology and periodically dive deep into the hardest architectural and technical problems, while multiplying impact through Staff+ engineers and technical leaders across the organization.

What you’ll need 

• Extensive experience building and operating large-scale production applications on Android or iOS, with deep expertise in mobile architecture.
• Proven experience driving major mobile-architecture decisions across areas such as modularization, application performance, build systems, dependency management, application size, or release infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to reason and operate across the client-server boundary, including designing APIs, data contracts, rollout mechanisms, and resilient end-to-end experiences.
• Track record of building platforms, frameworks, or engineering standards adopted by multiple teams—not solely delivering individual product features.
• Experience establishing multi-year technical direction and anticipating architectural risks before they constrain product or organizational execution.
• Demonstrated success leading complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives from strategy and design through global production adoption.
• Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries and align senior engineering, product, and business stakeholders around a technical direction.
• Expertise in establishing standards and practices for testing, performance, observability, reliability, and incident management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expert-level proficiency in Kotlin/Java or Swift/Objective-C, with the ability to work effectively across the broader technology stack.
• Experience with modern client architectures including server-driven experiences, cross-platform frameworks, hybrid applications, dynamic delivery, experimentation, and progressive rollouts.
• Experience designing robust client-server protocols and contracts using technologies such as GraphQL, gRPC, Protobuf, or equivalent API frameworks.
• Experience with large monorepositories, build systems such as Bazel, and mobile developer-productivity infrastructure.
• Experience optimizing applications for constrained devices and networks, particularly in emerging markets.
• Experience with on-device machine learning, model deployment and optimization, mobile ML runtimes, or hardware-accelerated inference.
• Strategic architecture mindset: the ability to balance near-term delivery with durable investments that improve engineering velocity, reliability, and product quality across an organization.
• Experience representing an organization through internal technical forums, external publications, conference talks, or open-source contributions.