Engineering Manager II, Ranking and Recommendations, Grocery and Retail

Job description

About the Role Uber has expanded its services beyond transporting people to include the delivery of nearly anything customers need, often within hours , with Grocery & Retail being a major growth priority. The Grocery and Retail Consumer Ranking Team is dedicated to creating a seamless and efficient shopping experience, enabling users to effortlessly find what they need. As the Engineering Manager for the Grocery & Retail Consumer Ranking team, you will lead the evolution of Uber’s online ranking architecture and high-throughput serving stack.

Your primary mission is to build the engine that powers seamless shopping experiences, ensuring that millions of users can find what they need in milliseconds. We are looking for a systems-focused leader to drive the design of our online retrieval and ranking services. You will oversee the delivery of real-time features, caching strategies, and storage solutions, while ruthlessly optimizing for p99 latency, resource costs, and 99.99% availability.

This role is at the intersection of complex distributed systems and product innovation, requiring a leader who can balance rapid experimentation with rock-solid operational excellence. While the core of this role is backend infrastructure, you will partner closely with Data Science and ML Engineering to integrate state-of-the-art models (Deep Learning, Embeddings, and GenAI) into a production environment that operates at Uber's global scale.

What You Will Do

Lead the team of backend and ML engineers owning the online ranking serving stack and integrations powering key consumer surfaces.

Own the Roadmap

Define, prioritize, and execute an ambitious product roadmap through strong people leadership—managing, coaching, and growing all team members.

Drive Reliability & Performance

Lead high-impact initiatives to improve p99 latency, tail-latency mitigation, and infra-cost efficiency for high-QPS services.

Evolve Data Flow

Oversee the development of real-time and batch pipelines, ensuring online/offline consistency for features and model inputs.

Technical Vision

Lay out the multi-quarter roadmap for ranking infra, leveraging senior ICs to drive architectural migrations and capacity planning.

Operational Excellence

Champion a strong engineering culture of on-call health, post-mortems, and graceful degradation/fallback strategies.

Scale Experimentation

Build and extend automated experimentation capabilities, including guardrails, logging, and debiasing. ---- Basic Qualifications ---- Experience: 10+ years in software engineering with a primary focus on high-traffic backend systems.

Leadership

4+ years of engineering management experience.

Backend & Systems Expertise

Deep experience in distributed systems, API/service design, and high-scale production serving.

Operational Ownership

Proven track record in managing SLOs/SLAs, incident response, and performance/latency optimization.

ML Partnership

Experience delivering ML-backed services and the ability to partner with DS/MLE on model requirements and evaluation.

Communication

Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to influence technical and product roadmaps. ---- Preferred Qualifications ---- People leadership : Unwavering commitment to maintaining high standards for personal contributions, team members, and product outcomes. A successful track record of hiring and developing high-performing teams.

Scale & Scope

Experience managing teams of 10+ engineers in a large-scale tech company (10k+ employees).

ML Platform Mastery

Experience integrating with large-scale ML platforms (feature stores, training infra, model registry) and model rollout patterns (canary/shadow, auto-rollback).

Optimization

Proven ability to make practical tradeoffs among latency, model quality, capacity, and maintainability.

Project Impact

History of leading multi-quarter re-architecture projects or migrations that significantly reduced costs or improved availability.

Cross-functional Negotiation

Ability to partner and negotiate cross-organizationally (Marketplace, Search, Merchandising) to integrate ranking outputs into end-to-end user flows. ~~ ~~

Responsibilities

For New York City, NY-based roles

The base salary range for this role is USD $232,000 per year - USD $258,000 per year. 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.