Senior Staff Engineer - Mobile – Payments Experience
About the Role
At Uber, our mission is to reimagine how people move and transact in the world. We’re looking for a Senior Staff Mobile Engineer to join our Payments Experience organization and drive innovation at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, payments, and human behavior. You will tackle complex, large-scale problems that require not only engineering prowess but also deep empathy for our users and insights into how systems and people interact.
As a technical leader, you’ll define the future of mobile engineering within Payments Experience, spearheading key initiatives like payment selection, error recovery, and session resilience to create delightful, seamless user experiences. Your contributions will directly impact Uber’s bottom line while influencing the lives of millions worldwide.
Example Projects You Might Lead
- Core Services Bridging: In a world where each line of business may pursue specialized client visions, you drive the systems thinking and strategy to stop that divergence from leaking through the payments stack.
- Unified Checkout Enhancements: Develop frameworks that seamlessly handle retries, authentication, efficient extension to new payment methods and session recovery, transforming error-prone flows into user-friendly experiences.
- 3DS Authentication Optimization: Build scalable, dynamic systems for secure transactions, aligning with compliance while enhancing the user experience.
- Session Resilience & Recovery: Define and implement error recovery strategies that improve payment success rates across Rides, Eats, Subscriptions and new verticals like Healthcare and Grocery.
- Arrears Consolidation: Collaborate with Risk, Funnel Optimization and Checkout teams to consolidate arrears handling into a cohesive system that reduces friction and improves cash flow.
What You Will Do
- Software Engineering Excellence
- Strategic Code and Practices: Write and document high-quality code that solves strategically important problems, promotes best practices, and drive adoption of organization-wide frameworks such as unified checkout and session resilience.
- Incident Management: Oversee on-call rotations and incident response processes, leveraging dynamic alerting mechanisms to improve reliability and reduce MTTD.
- Technical Mentorship: Provide high-quality code and design review feedback, setting the bar for testing, monitoring, and alerting systems. Mentor peers on frameworks like Uber’s MoneySDK to unify metrics and standardize dashboards.
- Debt Management: Drive initiatives to identify and reduce technical debt across mobile systems, driving forward-thinking initiatives like performance monitoring and optimization.
- Design and Architecture
- Systemic Vision: Identify long-term architectural opportunities and challenges, creating technical designs that simplify complexity and accelerate developer velocity.
- Framework Evangelism: Drive cross-team adoption of best practices like modular error recovery libraries layered on Unified Checkout to ensure scalability and developer efficiency.
- Anticipatory Planning: Foresee gaps in session recovery, such as authentication bottlenecks, and guide the technical trajectory to resolve them before they arise.
- Innovation in Payments UX: Shape the future of checkout flows, ensuring features like 3DS authentication and payment method onboarding align with user behaviors and preferences.
Collaboration and Leadership
Inclusive Leadership: Build an environment of open communication that values diverse perspectives and creates belonging. Champion initiatives like mentoring programs, technical writing workshops, and internal training/onboarding.
- Stakeholder Partnerships: Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Product Managers, UX designers, and external vendors, to execute on strategic initiatives.
- Decision-Making Excellence: Lead high-impact engineering projects from inception to production, balancing competing priorities while advocating for what is best for Uber, even when that creates challenges for the organization or other stakeholders.
- Representation and Influence: Act as a spokesperson for Uber’s technical community internally and externally, fostering thought leadership and driving improvements to the org-wide hiring bar.
Basic Qualifications
You’re more than just a mobile engineer—you’re a systems thinker and proven leader who thrives on solving large-scale challenges together with others. Drawing on insights from behavioral economics and anthropology, you understand the human and cultural contexts in which technology operates. For example:
- You leverage choice architecture principles to design intuitive payment flows that maximize conversion while minimizing friction.
- You apply neuroeconomics to simplify decision-making processes for users under time pressure during checkout.
- You embrace sociotechnical systems thinking, designing mobile frameworks that scale alongside cross-team dependencies while fostering human collaboration.
- Your vision inspires others, rallying engineers to deliver innovative solutions and make the right trade-offs to drive long-term impact.
Preferred Qualifications
- Extensive experience in mobile development (typically 10+ years), with a proven ability to build and scale world-class applications.
- Strong background in iOS development and strong familiarity with the Android ecosystem, with proficiency in modern frameworks and tools on both platforms. Bonus points for experience in backend and/or web.
- A systems thinker who can align architectural decisions with broader organizational goals.
- Skilled in cross-team collaboration, mentoring, and influencing technical direction across an organization.
- Passion for working in a fast-paced, mission-driven environment that values both technical excellence and human impact.
- Deep experience with experimentation frameworks and practices including the ability to reason beyond “green” and “red”.
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.
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.
*Accommodations may be available based on religious and/or medical conditions, or as required by applicable law. To request an accommodation, please reach out to accommodations@uber.com.
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Uber is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, Veteran Status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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