Staff Software Engineer - Android

About the Role

Engages with stakeholders across teams to lead the design, development, and evolution of the build systems and CI infrastructure that every Android engineer at Uber depends on.

Every change to Uber's Android apps — Rider, Driver, Uber Eats, and more — flows through the build. In this role, you will own the Android build end to end: the Bazel build graph and rules, remote caching, and the CI pipelines that verify every change before it lands. You will set the technical direction for making Android builds faster, more reliable, and more cost-efficient at monorepo scale, and lead cross-team initiatives to achieve these goals.

What You'll Do

• Own the Android build end to end — the Bazel build graph, Starlark rules and toolchains (Android, Kotlin, Java), and dependency management across a large, multi-app Android monorepo.
• Drive down CI and local build latency through remote build caching and remote execution, build-graph pruning, critical-path parallelism, and cost-aware CI sharding.
• Make local and CI results consistent, so a green local build, test, or lint result means a green CI run.
• Make every build failure actionable: eliminate flakiness and cache-correctness issues, add per-target telemetry and smarter retry policies, and ensure engineers and AI coding agents know what failed, how to fix it, and who to contact.
• Keep the Android build modern: lead Bazel upgrades, Kotlin and Android toolchain upgrades, and dependency-automation (Gazelle) rollouts as coordinated, low-disruption initiatives.
• Shrink the workload, not just speed it up: partner on smart test selection over the shared Bazel graph so each change runs only the tests it can affect, without sacrificing quality.
• Define and track build health — latency, success rate, cache hit rate, and flakiness — and catch regressions before developers feel them.
• Lead through influence: write design documents, set standards, mentor engineers, lead build incident response, and partner with Android Platform, CI Platform, and product teams to deliver improvements across the organization.

About the Team

Core Build is Uber's centralized build platform team. We own the common build infrastructure — Bazel, Gazelle, build rules, client-side remote build caching and execution, and shared build/test CI pipelines — across Uber's Java, Go, Android, iOS, and Web monorepos.

Our vision is simple: make builds fast with less friction. Because the stack is shared, an improvement we make once benefits every engineer at Uber.

We work across three pillars:

• Velocity: Make builds faster everywhere with fewer resources — in CI, remote development environments, and on laptops — through caching, remote execution, sharding, and build-graph optimization.
• Reliability & Diagnosability: A build failure should never leave an engineer stranded. Every failure should communicate what failed, how to fix it, and who can help.
• Modernization, Unification & Scale: Keep the platform on the latest Bazel, maximize CI fleet utilization with smart test selection and build-graph pruning, and apply GenAI/ML to automate diagnosis and optimization.

Our next major initiative is to stop compiling the same code thousands of times: make mobile builds remote-first, so a local build becomes a download rather than a compile, and run only the tests a change can actually affect.

As the Staff Android Engineer on the team, you will be the technical owner for the Android side of this roadmap.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of full-time engineering experience.
• Systematic problem-solving approach and knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and complexity analysis.
• Strong understanding of Android development.

Preferred Technical Skills

• Deep, hands-on experience with Bazel (or Buck) for Android builds: Starlark rules, rules_android / rules_kotlin, build-graph and dependency management.
• Remote build caching and remote execution (Remote Execution API; e.g., Buildbarn, BuildBuddy, EngFlow).
• Android build internals: Gradle, D8/R8, resource processing, and Kotlin compiler / annotation-processing performance.
• CI systems at scale (e.g., Buildkite): sharding, test orchestration, and flaky-test management.
• Build performance analysis and observability (Bazel profiles, Build Event Protocol, metrics, and regression dashboards).
• Leading large-scale build migrations or upgrades (e.g., Buck/Gradle to Bazel, Bazel major versions, bzlmod).
• Tooling development in Kotlin/Java.
• Applying LLMs/AI agents to developer tooling (e.g., automated build-failure diagnosis).
• Cross-platform experience (Android and iOS).