Sr Staff Engineer - Communications Platform (Conversational AI)

About the Role

As a Senior Staff Engineer at Uber, you will serve at the highest level of technical leadership, defining strategic direction, system architecture, and technical vision across global engineering platform teams and core business units. Senior Staff Engineers at Uber exert broad influence on critical technology and business choices across various organizations. In this role, you will act as a pragmatic, passionate technologist capable of designing, building, and deploying resilient, large-scale systems. Beyond executing on uniquely complex initiatives, you will act as an accessible thought leader, collaborative partner, and humble mentor, guiding and developing talented engineering teams.

The Communications Platform at Uber powers all real-time and asynchronous customer interactions worldwide. Operating as the underlying engine for global engagement, the platform provides high-throughput, fault-tolerant, low-latency & cost efficient smart routing infrastructure across voice, SMS, chat, push notifications, email and other 3rd party messaging channels(whatsapp etc) for Riders, Drivers, Couriers, Merchants, and Enterprise partners. Central to our strategy is our multimodal Conversational AI platform, which unifies voice and chat channels, real-time media processing, and LLM-driven orchestration. This platform powers context-aware AI agents and proactive intervention frameworks that optimizes Uber's global marketplace efficiency, safety, and operational reliability.

In this role, you will establish platform reliability standards and drive AI driven innovation helping the team’s mission to deliver magical communication experience to hundreds of millions of riders, drivers, couriers, and enterprise partners globally. You will act as a mentor to senior engineering talent, and be the principal architect behind high-stakes, large-scale distributed systems. You will define the multi-year architectural roadmap for core backend microservices, real-time streaming engines, vendor integrations, and interactive, multimodal conversational UI frameworks across web and mobile. By integrating state-of-the-art conversational AI models and real-time speech orchestration layers into core platform infrastructure, you will ensure sub-second latencies, high fault tolerance, and zero-downtime availability. Through intelligent automation and real-time observability, you will set the benchmark for AI-driven communication platforms at Uber scale.

This is a high-visibility, transformative role interfacing directly with Uber's core marketplace teams, safety, fraud, customer care, and AI infrastructure organizations. If you are a battle-tested technical leader, strategic architect, and collaborative executor, we invite you to join us in defining the future of AI driven real-time communication platforms.

What the Candidate Will Need / Bonus Points

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

• Architect the next-generation global Communications and Conversational AI Platform across all current and expanding business lines, including Mobility, Delivery, Freight, and Enterprise marketplace offerings.
• Actively seek out the toughest technology and engineering problems and solve them with little to no guidance.
• Own large opportunities and initiatives and drive clarity, convergence and closure across teams.
• Take the larger vision or challenge and distill it down with the leadership team into strategies and plans including trade-offs required to realize the vision.
• Be a role model on acting with good judgement and responsibility. Engineers across the organization will look to you on how best to plan and execute on projects.
• Provide overarching technical vision and architecture for real-time voice, streaming media, asynchronous messaging, and AI-driven conversational orchestration engines.
• Drive the architectural integration of voice/chat Conversational AI services, real-time audio streams (ASR/TTS/Speech-to-Speech), LLMs, and automated intervention engines across Uber's infrastructure.
• Raise the bar on sustainable engineering by improving best practices, producing best in class of code, documentation, testing and monitoring.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to executive leadership and a dedicated mentor for senior engineering talent, fostering a culture of technical rigor, architectural clarity, and decisive alignment.

Basic Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• Experience: 10+ years of professional full-time software engineering experience.
• Technical Proficiency: Strong expertise in modern backend languages—specifically Go, Java, or C++.
• Extensive backend engineering and distributed systems experience.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale, highly available systems.
• Proven technical leadership across multiple teams and complex initiatives.
• Strong system design, architecture, and cross-functional communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep, industry leading expertise in one or more technology spaces in the communication domain.
• Proven track record building and scaling Conversational AI platforms, real-time streaming voice/chat pipelines, WebRTC, LLM agent orchestration, or natural language understanding systems.
• Deep domain experience in telecommunications, CPaaS integrations (Twilio, Infobip, Sinch, etc.), or real-time media streaming infrastructure.

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.