Uber Tech celebrates seven years in India

In an exclusive interview with CIOL, Naga Kasu, Director, Engineering, Uber talks about the company’s future roadmap.

What other projects beyond mobility are the focus areas for Uber's Engineering Centres?

We have teams at Hyderabad working to innovate platforms that act as the foundation block for Uber’s marketplace across business lines. These teams handle critical functions such as Risk, Payments, Compliance, Infrastructure & IT Engineering.  We also have a dedicated engineering organization in Hyderabad that innovates business lines for the delivery vertical.

Can you outline the levels of innovations are a part of the Centre? 

Our teams at Hyderabad are continuously innovating across the full stack, which starts from the user interface layer (mobile, desktop, web & mobile web) to the underlying core service fabric of Uber. Risk and Payments engineering teams build seamless payment experiences for both earners and spenders on Uber’s marketplace.

Our Delivery engineering teams are enhancing restaurant and menu experiences, along with adding digital payment options to the app across the world. The team also led the backend for delivery of prescription medication in the US. The primary focus of the Platform engineering team is to build core application infrastructure that can process billions of business transactions per day in an accurate and timely manner.

How many IPs are being created every year? What are your plans for the next five years?

Uber India Engineering is a critical tech center for Uber, and we are building core application infrastructure that is extensible, scalable and seamless for Uber’s ever growing business models and products.

Compared to the tech innovations in the country, where does Uber stand in the overall scenario?

Our teams here in India innovate Uber’s technology that empowers millions of users on the marketplace across the globe. The fact that each city is unique is a distinguished technological challenge when compared to other engineering problem domains, as we have to build systems suited to individual market needs.

Adding to this, Uber’s scale makes it a combinatorial complexity. In computer science any problem space that is combinatorial in nature adds fun in solving. Such problems need deep expertise in distributed systems, advanced algorithms, and machine learning models. Our engineers in India continuously innovate on building heuristics and its fine tuned implementations that make millions of physical movements daily worldwide, just like magic.

What is your manpower now and how does the hiring scenario look like?

Our Bengaluru and Hyderabad centers collectively have a total of 750+ engineers, and in line with our growth plans, we’re hiring 250 more engineers this year.