Blog posts about General Engineering

Uber’s backend is an exemplar of microservice architecture. Each microservice is a small, individually deployable program performing a specific business logic (operation). The microservice architecture is a type of distributed computing ...

Introduction Each day, Uber moves millions of people around the world and delivers tens of millions of food and grocery orders. This generates a large number of financial transactions that need to be stored with provable completeness, co...

Background Apache Kafka® is widely used across Uber’s multiple business lines. Take the example of an Uber ride: When a user opens up the Uber app, demand and supply data are aggregated in Kafka queues to serve fare calculations. When a ...

Scaling our data infrastructure with lower hardware costs while maintaining high performance and service reliability has been no easy feat. To accommodate the exponential growth in both Data Storage and Analytics Compute at Uber, the Dat...

  Introduction The Fulfillment Platform is a foundational Uber domain that enables the rapid scaling of new verticals. The platform handles billions of database transactions each day, ranging from user actions (e.g., a driver starting a ...

Uber recently launched a new capability: Ads on UberEats. With this new ability came new challenges that needed to be solved at Uber, such as systems for ad auctions, bidding, attribution, reporting, and more. This article focuses on how...

At Uber, real-time mobile analytics events—generated by button taps, page views, and more—form the backbone of the mobile data workflow process. To process these events, our Mobile Data Platform Team designed and developed the Fontana li...

Problem Uber deploys a few storage technologies to store business data based on their application model. One such technology is called Schemaless, which enables the modeling of related entries in one single row of multiple columns, as we...

Introduction Uber’s GSS (Global Scaled Solutions) team runs scaled programs for diverse products and businesses, including but not limited to Eats, Rides, and Freight. The team transforms Uber’s ideas into agile, global solutions by desi...

Uber has one of the largest deployments of Apache Kafka in the world, processing trillions of messages and multiple petabytes of data per day. As Figure 1 shows, today we position Apache Kafka as a cornerstone of our technology stack. It...

Background Uber is committed to providing reliable services to customers across our global markets. To achieve this, we heavily rely on machine learning (ML) to make informed decisions like forecasting and surge. As a result, real-time s...

Introduction Our engineers have the responsibility of ensuring a consistent and positive experience for our riders, drivers, eaters, and delivery/restaurant partners. Ensuring such an experience requires reliable systems: our apps have t...

Introduction  Content quality is critical to the support experienced by Uber’s customers. Consider an Eater who reached out for help to cancel a very delayed order. The same resolution, such as refunding the charge, can be delivered alon...

With Uber’s business growth and the fast adoption of big data and AI, Big Data scaled to become our most costly infrastructure platform. To reduce operational expenses, we developed a holistic framework with 3 pillars: platform efficienc...

As Uber’s business has expanded, the underlying pool of data that powers it has grown exponentially, and thus ever more expensive to process. When Big Data rose to become one of our largest operational expenses, we began an initiative to...

Introduction Big data is at the core of Uber’s business. We continue to innovate and provide better experiences for our earners, riders, and eaters by leveraging big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technology. As a re...

Uber delivers efficient and reliable transportation across the global marketplace, which is powered by hundreds of services, machine learning models, and tens of thousands of datasets. While growing rapidly, we’re also committed to maint...

For a company of our size and scale, robust, accurate, and compliant accounting and analytics are a necessity, ensuring accurate and granular visibility into our financials, across multiple lines of business. Most standard, off-the-shelf...