Introducing #LADYENG at Uber Engineering

When you work at one of the fastest-growing companies in the world, you get used to building some pretty awesome things. Our internal #LadyEng organization was founded in 2014 to improve the recruitment process, career opportunities, and general work environment for women engineers and other technical roles.

We organize lecture series, office visits from cool partners like Girls Who Code and Hackbright Academy, and lunches with our CEO, but we’re also an everyday resource for women to give and get advice on the things that matter to us. Log into our chat room and you’ll find everything from reposted technical articles to impassioned conversations about work-life balance, plus (obviously) tons of cute cat videos.

Now you can hear from some of us in #LadyEng about why it’s so exciting to work here.

“Working with a small team, I helped create a framework and supporting libraries that make scaffolding, building, testing, and linting new front-end projects super easy. Not only did I get recognized for that in a performance evaluation with an exceptionally high score in our Enduring Architecture category, but I get to see my work validated every day as our test coverage and code quality improve. The bigger we grow, the more those types of amazing opportunities appear. I love how easy it is to spot a problem and ask your manager, ‘Hey, can I take that on?’”

“The team that I created and manage has taken engineering onboarding from two weeks to two hours. This year, I’m looking forward to building such a bulletproof developer experience that anyone from a day-one new grad to the 30-year-veteran developer can be productive as soon and as smoothly as possible.”

“In 2014, I played a big part in the rollout of our Developer API, writing an attributions service in two weeks and spinning out the fares logic into its own service. It felt amazing to be part of a tight team working toward a big launch. We’re just starting to explore the idea of Uber as a platform, including what functionality to give to external developers, and I can’t wait to be part of that ongoing conversation.”

“One of the things I’ve learned here is that I have a strong voice and people listen to me. A lot of coworkers I haven’t been formally introduced to actually recognize me from asking tough questions at our weekly Q&A with Travis (Uber’s CEO)! I’m excited to explore those leadership capabilities even further in 2015. I want Uber to be known as a place where assertive women aren’t only rewarded professionally, but liked.”

“Coordinating the Mezzanine project — a new, highly scalable, extensible trips service that we added in 2014 — was one of the highlights of my time at Uber so far. There are so many cool things coming up, but the three things I’m most excited for would probably be: the new dispatching system we’re building to service the non-transportation options in our app, the work we’re doing for datacenter reliability, and growing my team of technical program managers so we can have an even bigger impact.”

“Within three months of joining Uber, I helped launch our Uber for Business product, serving as both engineering manager and product manager — crazy times, but I had so much fun doing it with a great team. Our roadmap for 2015 is equally ambitious and I can’t wait.”

“During my time at Uber, I’ve been lucky enough to go back and forth between engineering projects and data science projects. Most recently, I helped release an internal PyPI package that consolidates and improves utilities we use, setting us up for better data access practices and making it easier for new analysts to start querying our databases and internal services. Even after almost three years, I’m still learning new things.”

“The highlight of my year was working till 4 a.m. with my team the night before our company holiday party on a performance feature for New Year’s Eve. That feature was later released several hours into the holiday party as a last-resort option to solve a big outage. Within five minutes of releasing the feature all of our systems went back to stable, and the same feature helped NYE be a smooth day with no outages.”

“My team built first-class data visualization and reporting tools for our coworkers on operations teams in 250+ cities around the world. I love knowing how much those tools help our Ops teams grow and manage the cities they run, and I’m excited to see where they go next and what we build to help them get there in 2015.”

“I’m proud of the huge operational impact that my work on Uber Perks had — we reduced execution time from two hours to less than two minutes, had a linear increase in employees every month, and significantly decreased outages. In 2015, I want to make my program’s services some of the most reliable, scalable, and fast services at Uber while also contributing to safety features so that Uber continues to be the most reliable and secure ride for women around the world.”

“The fast growth of our engineering team means that — even as a new grad — you’re considered an ‘expert’ on certain systems within a few months of working here. I’ve had the opportunity to mentor some fantastic engineers, own my own projects, and be trusted with critical fixes; all things I didn’t expect to be thrown into nearly as quickly as I was. It’s been incredibly rewarding to live up to those (sometimes terrifyingly big) expectations.”

“The work I have been doing to make background checks more robust is challenging and rewarding, and reminds me of the impact we have on the real world. Seeing the team come together and push hard to challenge ourselves to be safer makes me proud to be here. There is a constant echo of ‘Are we better today than we were yesterday?’ in the air.”

“Upon joining the DevOps team, I was immediately thrown into the fast datacenter planning and engineering at Uber. The hard work of all the infrastructure engineering teams really came together on NYE when we delivered a flawless operational night.”

Uber is an amazing place where we get to solve new, exciting problems every day — but, like all good engineers, we know we can build something even better. To that end, we’ll continue working hard to raise awareness about women’s issues both at Uber and in the broader tech community. Follow along with additional #LadyEng news and updates of what we’re up to, throughout the coming year right here on our engineering blog.