"Technology built for India should also be extended to the rest of the world"

Uber is constantly innovating, creating and testing new products that not only suit the local Indian market but are being explored in global emerging markets that face similar challenges. Uber’s Hyderabad team has a unique opportunity to do some meaningful work and have a direct impact on Uber’s growth worldwide. Sharing more on this and about the robust engineering team behind Uber, Naga Kasu, Site Leader - Uber Hyderabad Tech Centre tells VARINDIA of how this has been made possible - 

How is the engineering team at Uber Hyderabad Tech center positioned to provide enhanced rider, driver, eater, courier and restaurant experience?

India is a global priority for Uber, especially when it comes to engineering and innovations. We launched Asia’s first Engineering Center in Hyderabad followed by launching and Engineering Center at Bangalore as a testament to Uber’s commitment to innovating from India for the world. In line with our global philosophy of igniting opportunities through mobility, Uber’s Engineering Centres in India are engaged in cutting-edge basic and applied technology solutions in areas such as rider experience, digital payments, fraud and risk mapping, telematics, vehicle tracking/safety and fleet management, and the Uber core experience. 

Right from requesting a ride to post trip interactions and unlocking payment methods to scheduling driver partner payouts, ensuring a frictionless and secure experience for every rider and driver is of utmost priority. This critical piece of engineering is managed by teams in Hyderabad. 

Teams at Uber Hyderabad tech center are also working towards bringing restaurants on the platform of uber eats through menu digitization along with suggesting high quality image based menus of popular restaurants while a user is scrolling the app for the perfect ordering experience. 

In line with our goal to innovate with global impact, we believe that technology that we build for India, should also be extended to the rest of the world. 

What criteria have been set in order to develop a robust engineering team in Hyderabad?

We are a company that is growing tremendously fast. Uber is available in more than 700 cities across 63 countries on six continentsmore than 20,000 employees globally and growing. Our engineering teams in India and around the world are constantly working on innovative technologies and features that will give riders, driver partners, delivery partners and eats users a great experience. 

All tech centers in Uber have a global charter, including Hyderabad. The core tenant for engineering team at Hyderabad is to solve real world problems at scale and speed. 

The usage patterns of Uber platforms across the geographies are transforming at a pretty rapid pace to ignite the opportunities for many people around the globe. In order to empower the marketplace, the software platforms should evolve at a faster pace and at scale. 

Besides best-in-class engineering, we are also hiring product management, data science/ML, research and product design experts to collaborate with the global engineering and product teams to solve real world problems. We understand that every geographic region has its own unique transportation requirements and challenges, and this reflects in our everyday strategy as we connect physical to digital and vice versa. . 

What have been some of the recent innovations from Uber to build a robust product that serves the interests of both its customers and the company? How has the Consumer-Engaging Digital Campaign for the ICC Men’s World Cup 2019 been met and how successful it was?

The most exciting project for Hyderabad engineering was supporting ICC world cup campaign for Uber. This project was taken up as a part of innovation forum at the center called My innovation time (MIT). Which means this was engineering work by volunteering and the engineers involved would get to allocate 20% of their time to this in a week over and above their regular development work.  

Uber being official Sponsor for ICC World Cup Riders, wanted to ensure that our customers/partners - Eaters, Drivers and Couriers are part of this event. We came up with a Campaign where every time rider takes a trip or eater orders food or courier delivers food they will get either 4 or 6 runs. Based on the number of runs scored they will receive ICC world cup tickets or merchandise from Uber. This needed a good technology solution of building robust scalable Scoring Engine at trip scale for India.  Engineering team built this solution in less than 1 week and commercialised ICC World Cup playing countries in less than 2 weeks in total. 

What are the various divisions created in the Engineering department?

Payments and Financial Engineering

Payments engineering is about all the payment instruments and financial decision that Uber processes for all the product offerings to its customers and partners. What does this mean? 

Imagine two people are sharing an Uber ride to the airport. In the physical world, an average shared trip to the airport may include 3-4 transactional money movement - tolls, parking charges, airport fees, cost split. On uber platform this is converted into one single digital transaction. Also, This is just one ride. There are billions of rides taking place on Uber platform. 

Payments and financial engineering is all about revenue Computation platform economics, payments and common infrastructure to support these digital transactions at global scale. 

Eats Engineering

One of the key business challenges for Eats business is to bring more and more restaurants on the platform to benefit both restaurants by providing access to more customers and customers by providing access to more restaurants. Many small cafes and restaurants in India have very basic menus and no digital footprints.  

We are committed to bring millions of restaurants onto the platform including digitising their menus and connecting them to eaters with their favourite food for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Risk Sciences

With billions of transactions happening on the platform, one key challenge is to ensure that all user interactions are done with utmost care and integrity. This includes successfully securing our users against malicious attempts from actors on the platform who make a living on undermining it. This team is committed to understand fraud and address it at the earliest and improve risk experience by interacting with blocked users and bringing them back to the Uber platform if verified as non risk users.