Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)

About this episode

Thuan Pham discusses his experience scaling Uber's engineering organization and the architectural changes made during his tenure as CTO.

Brought to You By: • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — Thuan Pham was Uber's first and longest-serving CTO, and today he’s the CTO of Faire, a B2B wholesale platform. Back when Thuan joined Uber, it had around 40 engineers and 30,000 rides per day, and the system crashed multiple times a week. Over seven years, he helped rebuild the system, move it from a monolith to microservices, and scaled the engineering organization behind it. I had the privilege of working with Thuan for four of those seven years. Later, the very first issue of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter was a deepdive into Uber’s Program and Platform split . This episode of the podcast contains a nice “full circle” moment, where Thuan shares even more details about why Uber chose to embrace that structure. We discuss what it takes to operate and build in that kind of environment. Thuan explains how he divided his time at Uber into three “tours of duty,” from stabilizing a fragile system, to re-architecting it, and scaling…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Thuan Pham

Topics covered

• scaling engineering organizations
• microservices
• Uber's architecture
• B2B wholesale platforms
• rapid growth strategies

Keywords

• Uber
• Thuan Pham
• scaling
• microservices
• engineering organization
• B2B
• architecture
• growth

Sponsors

Statsig, Sonar, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Uber, Faire

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