First came love, then came Uber

Written by Danyel Waller, Talent Attraction & Employer Brand Program Manager

Veterans embody the resiliency and passion for building something bigger and embracing the challenge of creating a better world that makes individuals thrive at Uber. We’re proud to have 300+ Military, Veterans, and Partners (MVPs) on our global team today, some who join directly from the military into best-fit roles, and others who leverage Uber’s unique programs that bridge the gap between service and corporate life. 

That’s how Anthony and Miah Clay, two Software Engineers who are married, joined Uber. After their service in the Navy and Coast Guard, both are currently in the Eng BOOST fellowship, an 8-month Uber program that supports passionate and tech-savvy people from non-traditional backgrounds to work alongside our engineers and bridge the gap between academic theoretical knowledge and practical professional experience.

We sat down with Anthony and Miah to learn about their path to Uber and how they balance life together as a couple and colleagues. 

“He’s my work husband and my real husband” – Miah

After 8 years and 3 deployments, Anthony separated from the Navy while Miah has now spent 14 years in the Coast Guard (currently in the reserves). Once a month, while at drill, Anthony get’s “solo dad duty,” with their young daughter and “he does it gracefully and wonderfully,” explains Miah.

Both Anthony and Miah never imagined being Software Engineers at Uber—or that they would work so closely together in their careers. If it hadn’t been for a serendipitous swipe on OkCupid, they may never have met, or realized they lived across the street from each other. With their desire to learn new hard skills, and propel their careers forward, they attended the VetsInTech recruiting events, where they learned about the Eng BOOST fellowship program at Uber. Now they both work hand-in-hand to build the foundation of Uber’s platform. When serendipity crosses the path of tenacity, grit, and passion, lightning can strike and stars can align. That’s how Anthony and Miah became both real-life and work husband and wife. 

In 2015, Anthony worked for the U.S. Navy, on amphibious ships in Norfolk, VA before eventually transitioning to work adjacent to the Pentagon as a Program and Product Manager for the Chief Information Officer of Navy HR. While there, he aided in the major transformation and cloud migration of legacy Navy Human Resource systems––no easy task for such a large and complex organization. At the same time, Miah was working for the U.S. Coast Guard in Norfolk as a Marine Casualty Investigator running root cause analysis on foreign and domestic ships, focusing on onboard accidents and equipment failures. After catching each other’s attention on the dating app, they went on a first date. The immediate next day, Miah came home and told her roommate, “That’s going to be your brother-in-law.” 

While still on active duty, and applying to several schools, Miah was eventually accepted into an MBA program at her dream school, Columbia. When she started business school, Anthony was stationed in San Diego, meaning the two had to grow their relationship through long-distance. Working on her MBA, Miah was kept busy, but when she could escape, she visited Anthony out in San Diego. The most challenging part of living so far apart, while Anthony was on active duty, Miah says, was “trying to stay busy and yet be present for that person while they’re gone, while making sure to take care of your own mental health.”

After two years of long distance, Miah and Anthony decided to move closer to one another. A long-distance engagement was hard, and there was another deployment for Anthony looming as well as a duty station change for both coming up quickly. “The only way we could be stationed together was to marry.” Before Anthony could leave for deployment, “we decided to elope. To be honest, we ended up finding a guy on Craigslist to marry us, and the rest has been history.”

Not long after becoming the Clays, and arriving at their new duty station in Washington D.C., Miah decided they should buy a house. The problem? Anthony would soon deploy and be out to sea for almost a year before enjoying their new house. When Anthony was training for his deployment, it also meant he was out at sea while Miah was house hunting. He says “It was difficult not being with Miah for these special occasions, including buying our first house. While she was looking, she’d send me little blurry photos of houses and take me through quick video tours. I’d be signing documents with a slower-than-slow internet. It was hard trying to buy a home in the middle of the ocean!”

Fast forward to 2021. Both Anthony and Miah took their desire to learn new skills into their own hands, taking two separate coding boot camps within a few months of each other. Anthony’s time as a program and product manager inspired him to pursue his interest in coding: “As a whole, I was adept at the product level, but I wanted to know more about how it works, which is where the coding boot camp came into play.” 

It wasn’t until after Anthony decided not to return to service, after his third deployment, that Miah decided she also wanted to learn how to code. “I had multiple ideas and thought to myself, how cool would it be to code this. Why not learn a hard skill?” Taking the reins, Miah and Anthony both went through Skillbridge, an Uber partner that helps military members who are transitioning off of active duty service to build hard skills or alternatively intern with a company. They both jumped at the opportunity to join coding boot camps that they may otherwise never have had the opportunity for.

Soon after, Miah and Anthony began looking for jobs in software development. They met with members of Veterans at Uber early on in their job search. Uber’s Eng BOOST fellowship program was brought up several times at recruiting events for veterans, and was a perfect fit because it focuses on developing individuals from non-traditional backgrounds into Software Engineers. To get their foot in the door, and before the BOOST program opportunity was publicly posted, Miah and Anthony applied to the MVP roles at Uber, where they were then contacted about moving forward with BOOST. 

“The Uber recruiters we spoke to were always very focused on us and our experience. You could tell they cared about veterans and wanted what we had to offer at the company. That is what initially drew me to the company. The fact that they weren’t just talking about how they wanted veterans. I appreciated that they were working hard to get veterans to join Uber.” 

“My mentor put me in contact with a couple of employees, one who had done the same Skillbridge program as me, and one who did not. They both raved about Uber, were very happy, and they said they weren’t going anywhere, which said a lot.” After reaching out to several Uber employees to ask about the culture and what they could expect, Miah and Anthony decided to accept their BOOST offers. 

During the first few months of the program Miah and Anthony were working closely together. They took the same training, all while sitting right next to each other in the office. When asked about what it has been like working together, Miah says “I was recently on a call, and our daughter, who was home sick, started having a meltdown. He understands so much about what I do, working at the same company, and doing similar work. He had a break in his schedule and was able to take her and put her down for a nap, so I could finish my product meeting. It’s been such a nice balance.”

These days, “we have lunch together, but we work on different teams. It’s the perfect amount of “together time,” shares Miah. “There are also no other BOOST fellows in our office, so he understands where I’m coming from, the struggles I’m going through, and the wins. It’s nice to live and do life with someone who understands all of the same perspectives.”

When asked what they appreciate about one another, Miah says, “I have never met someone as determined to learn as he is. For example, we bought a fixer-upper, and anything he doesn’t understand, he will figure out. He spends a lot of time ensuring things are done at a high quality.”

As for Anthony, he says Miah’s determination is what he appreciates most. “There are very few things that when she wants to do them, that she won’t do everything necessary to accomplish it.” Anthony was able to see first hand how decisive Miah was while they were dating, and during their engagement, “from studying all the time to get into her MBA program, to applying to schools while taking courses, and getting into such a competitive school as Columbia. Miah can achieve anything she puts her mind to. There are very few things that she doesn’t make happen when she says she’ll do them, including this marriage.”  

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