---
title: "Uber"
description: "a global technology platform that connects people who need a ride or delivery with independent drivers and couriers through a smartphone app."
---

# Uber
> a global technology platform that connects people who need a ride or delivery with independent drivers and couriers through a smartphone app.

## Articles

### [Running Cost-Efficient Export Workloads at Uber](https://yomu.fyi/post/running-cost-efficient-export-workloads-at-uber.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 12, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Uber’s offline export workloads often retrieve a small set of records from large, date-partitioned Apache Hudi tables, but narrow historical predicates can still trigger full-table scans. Repeatedly touching files, metadata, or Parquet footers keeps Google Cloud Storage objects hot, undermining Auto-Class tiering and increasing storage, retrieval, metadata-operation, egress, and latency costs. The approach combines Hudi column stats with sorting on predicate columns: metadata-table statistics prune files without opening them, while clustered records tighten file-level min/max ranges and make pruning more selective. A Hudi secondary index was evaluated but did not reduce file scans enough because records for a subject were spread across most files. The conclusion is that a one-time rewrite and ongoing Hudi table services can turn broad historical scans into lower-touch lookups, while future work targets multi-column layouts and automated ROI-based optimization.


### [Car Seat FAQ](https://yomu.fyi/post/car-seat-faq.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 11, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Uber Car Seat rides use a Nuna RAVA Series convertible car seat and require drivers to view a Nuna installation demonstration. The RAVA is intended for children weighing 5 to 65 pounds and measuring 49 inches or less; parents, guardians, or caregivers must verify eligibility and secure the child properly. Nuna prefers vehicle-seat-belt installation because it avoids confusion about switching from lower anchors, fits more vehicle makes, and supports more seating positions, while NYC drivers attend an installation demonstration. Children above 65 pounds or 49 inches will not have an appropriate seat, and caregivers should consult the provided videos or manual for installation and securing guidance. To address allergy concerns, drivers may ask for children’s hands to be cleaned after eating, and caregivers should ask before food is consumed in the vehicle.


### [Enabling Seamless Kafka Async Queuing with Consumer Proxy](https://yomu.fyi/post/enabling-seamless-kafka-async-queuing-with-consumer-proxy.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 10, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Uber’s Kafka deployment grew from 1 million to 12 million messages per second, but using Kafka’s ordered, partition-bound consumer model for asynchronous queueing created partition-scalability limits and head-of-line blocking. A one-second RPC example would require 1,000 partitions to reach 1,000 events per second, while non-uniform latency and poison-pill messages could stall unrelated work. Consumer Proxy addresses the mismatch by fetching messages through Kafka’s binary protocol, pushing them individually over gRPC, collecting processing statuses, and committing offsets only when safe. It also provides features including out-of-order commits, dead-letter-queue operations, flow control, and circuit breaking while hiding Kafka consumer-group management from services. At Uber, Consumer Proxy became the primary async-queueing solution, with hundreds of services onboarded; adaptive flow control and Kafka cluster federation are planned next steps.


### [Zero-Sum by Design: 10 Years of Uber’s Payments Platform](https://yomu.fyi/post/zero-sum-by-design-10-years-of-uber-s-payments-platform.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 10, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Uber’s Payments Platform, internally called Gulfstream, grew from a small 2016 microservices effort into infrastructure supporting $217 billion in annualized gross bookings, nearly twice that amount in total money movement, and ledger balances for more than 1.2 billion entities. It is built around immutable Money Orders, zero-sum double-entry accounting, strongly consistent ledger balances, and three core models: money orders, ledgers, and entity changelogs. Independent stateless services communicate primarily through Apache Kafka, while generic abstractions for lines of business and payment instruments let new products and methods plug into the platform; synchronous in-session flows use Cadence. As scale and audit requirements increased, Uber introduced Entity Fares, addressed hot ledger entities, and built LedgerStore for auditability and tamper-evident record-keeping, while also extending the ledger as a multi-tenant service.


### [Uber Advertising Launches New Marketing Solutions for Restaurants](https://yomu.fyi/post/uber-advertising-launches-new-marketing-solutions-for-restaurants.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 6, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Uber Advertising is introducing Deal Drops and Reorder Rewards, two marketing solutions for restaurants designed around customers’ real-time ordering decisions. Deal Drops let participating restaurants run special offers for one hour before select cultural events, with in-app and push notifications, home feed placement, a dedicated hub, and optional inventory limits that add urgency. Reorder Rewards give customers a surprise reward after an order for their next purchase, keep it visible for a limited time, and apply it at checkout without extra steps. Uber says early global results showed restaurants using Reorder Rewards saw about a 5.5% average sales increase compared with what they would have earned without them, based on aggregate advertiser data from September through November 2025, not a guarantee. Together, these tools target high-intent event decisions and post-purchase re-engagement, with the stated aim of turning attention into action and one-time orders into stronger customer relationships.


### [Rider insights: How NJ Transit’s Access Link Riders’ Choice Pilot redefines mobility freedom](https://yomu.fyi/post/rider-insights-how-nj-transit-s-access-link-riders-choice-pilot-redefi.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 5, 2026
- Type: Announcement

NJ TRANSIT’s Access Link Riders’ Choice (ALRC) Pilot 2.0 gives eligible paratransit customers on-demand Uber rides across five New Jersey service regions, with up to $20 off 10 trips monthly for work, appointments, and leisure. Launched in 2024, the pilot addresses traditional paratransit constraints such as advance booking and fixed time windows; Uber data as of July 30, 2026, records more than 269,000 rides. In an Easterseals webinar, rider Wanda Williford and caregiver Sharice Frazile described same-day availability as life-changing, reducing scheduling stress and enabling unexpected medical visits and other travel. Their accounts portray flexibility, real-time ride access, and spontaneity as practical changes to daily routines for riders and caregivers, while Williford calls the program a “game changer” for New Jersey paratransit.


### [A beginner’s guide to Uber vouchers for riders](https://yomu.fyi/post/a-beginner-s-guide-to-uber-vouchers-for-riders.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 5, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

Uber connects riders with drivers through a mobile application, while Uber Vouchers lets transit agencies, universities, and colleges subsidize eligible rides. A voucher added to a rider’s account generally covers trip costs up to a stated amount; any excess is charged to the default payment method, while tips remain optional and are charged separately. The guide explains how to download the app, create an account with matching contact information, link payment, track and verify the arriving vehicle, complete a trip, rate the driver, and access in-app Help. It also covers requesting rides by text-capable phone through 833-USE-UBER (833-873-8237) from 4am to 10pm ET, service-animal access, lost items, and the in-app Safety Toolkit.


### [Access On Demand pilot with RTD’s Access-a-Ride](https://yomu.fyi/post/access-on-demand-pilot-with-rtd-s-access-a-ride.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 4, 2026
- Type: Announcement

RTD’s Access-on-Demand pilot gives eligible Access-a-Ride customers subsidized, curb-to-curb Uber trips that can be requested the same day instead of scheduled in advance. The program complements rather than replaces Access-a-Ride, offers up to 60 subsidized trips per month across participating providers, and operates throughout RTD’s service area during Access-a-Ride hours, except 1:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m. Riders pay a $4.50 standard fare or $2.25 LiVE fare, while RTD subsidizes up to $20 per eligible trip; riders cover amounts beyond that limit. To use the benefit, customers need active certification, must complete RTD enrollment, and activate an Uber voucher linked to their enrolled account, which applies automatically to eligible trips.


### [Introducing Delayed Ride Guarantee](https://yomu.fyi/post/introducing-delayed-ride-guarantee.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Aug 3, 2026
- Type: Announcement

Delayed Ride Guarantee is launching in selected cities to increase a driver’s fare when a ride takes longer than the estimate shown in the offer card. After pickup, a ride that runs at least five minutes beyond the original estimate receives an automatic adjustment for driving time from pickup to drop-off, shown on the trip receipt. Wait-time fees, tips, and trip-change rules remain separate: rider-added stops are recalculated using time and distance rates, while unnecessary long detours do not qualify. The policy is intended to protect drivers from delays outside their control, but it excludes New York City, Washington state, Oregon state, and the listed products, including Hourly, Intercity, Connect, Rentals, High Capacity Vehicles, specified Taxi rides, and Matched Share Rides.


### [Using Triggers On Schemaless, Uber Engineering's Datastore Using MySQL](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-triggers-on-schemaless-uber-engineering-s-datastore-using-mysql.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 31, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Schemaless triggers provides a scalable, fault-tolerant, and lossless way to listen for changes in Schemaless, Uber Engineering’s datastore using MySQL, and drives workflows including trip billing, analytics-warehouse ingestion, and cross-datacenter replication. Schemaless stores immutable cells and all their versions, allowing each shard to function as a partitioned change log with monotonically increasing added IDs while retaining random-access APIs. The framework tails shards through get\_cells\_for\_shard, assigns them to worker processes under a leader, persists offsets in shared storage, and invokes column-specific callbacks such as bill\_rider; handlers must be idempotent because retries can occur. Failed workers’ shards are reassigned, repeatedly failing cells can move to a separate queue, processing continues during leader or shared-storage outages although redistribution pauses, and replicas insulate triggers from database-node failures.


### [The Architecture of Schemaless, Uber Engineering's Trip Datastore Using MySQL](https://yomu.fyi/post/the-architecture-of-schemaless-uber-engineering-s-trip-datastore-using.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 31, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Schemaless is Uber's scalable, fault-tolerant datastore whose immutable cells are identified by row key, column name, and ref key, while JSON content remains schemaless and supports eventually consistent secondary indexes. Its worker nodes accept HTTP requests, route them to storage nodes, and aggregate results, while storage data is partitioned into typically 4096 shards, each replicated across one master and two minions in multiple data centers. Writes go to the master and replicate asynchronously, with idempotent retries, circuit breakers, failover, and configurable reads from masters or minions. To reduce loss during master failure, buffered writes persist each request to a primary and secondary cluster, though buffered data may not be immediately readable. Each shard maps to a MySQL database, where an auto-increment added\_id primary key supports linear insertion and trigger processing, and MessagePack with ZLib compresses cell JSON blobs.


### [Best Delivery App to Work with in 2026 | Uber Uber](https://yomu.fyi/post/best-delivery-app-to-work-with-in-2026-uber-uber.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 31, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Choosing a delivery platform in 2026 depends on hourly earning potential, payout speed, vehicle requirements, scheduling flexibility, and extras beyond base fares. The guide compares six US apps—Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon Flex, Grubhub, and Walmart Spark—across restaurant, convenience, grocery, retail, and package work. It describes Uber Eats features including per-delivery fares, 100% tip retention, Tip Guarantee, Uber Pro Card access to earnings after each delivery, promotions, vehicle flexibility, and scheduling options. Competitors use different models: Instacart shoppers pick groceries, Amazon Flex pays guaranteed block fares, and some services impose market-specific conditions. The guide cautions that earnings are market-dependent, figures may not be directly comparable, and net income must account for fuel, maintenance, phone data, and self-employment taxes.


### [Using Uber: your guide to Pace's RAP Program](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-uber-your-guide-to-pace-s-rap-program.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 31, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

Pace’s Ride Access Program (RAP) is a supplementary service for ADA paratransit riders in its six-county region, using transportation network companies such as Uber to expand transportation options through ride vouchers. RAP riders can use subsidies for up to eight Uber trips daily, pay a $3.25 co-pay, and receive up to $26.75 per trip, while covering costs above the $30 total limit; trips must start and end within the Pace ADA service area. The guide explains enrollment-related account setup, including matching the Uber account’s contact details to the RAP profile, verifying identity, and recognizing the in-app voucher through a strikethrough market price and subsidized initial charge. It also documents a no-smartphone booking option at 833-USE-UBER, support channels, optional tipping, service-animal access, lost-item recovery, and in-app safety tools.


### [Using Uber: your guide to NJ TRANSIT’s Access Link Riders’ Choice Pilot 2.0](https://yomu.fyi/post/using-uber-your-guide-to-nj-transit-s-access-link-riders-choice-pilot.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 31, 2026
- Type: Tutorial

NJ TRANSIT’s Access Link Riders’ Choice (ALRC) Pilot 2.0 gives eligible Access Link customers another option for eligible trips through participating transportation network companies, including Uber. Access Link subsidizes up to 10 Uber trips per month at up to $20 per trip, provided each ride begins and ends within an eligible service area and occurs between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., seven days a week. After enrollment, riders match their Uber account information to their ALRC profile, accept the voucher from Uber, verify it in the Uber Wallet, and confirm its application before requesting a ride. The guide explains app and phone booking, voucher opt-out, payment, safety checks, support, tipping, service animals, lost items, and incident reporting.


### [Scaling Exact COUNT(DISTINCT) for High-Cardinality Non-Rollup Metrics in Distributed Data Pipelines](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-exact-count-distinct-for-high-cardinality-non-rollup-metrics-i.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 30, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Uber needed exact COUNT(DISTINCT) for high-cardinality non-rollup metrics such as monthly active users and quarterly retention, where daily or monthly counts cannot be combined and quarterly processing involved 3.6 billion UUID-valued identifiers. RoaringBitmap was exact but failed when a merged bitmap exceeded the JVM’s roughly 2 GB array limit, while HyperLogLog’s 1–5% error was unacceptable for financial reporting. The implemented chunked aggregation buffer hashes each UUID with xxHash64, routes it by the top 16 bits into one of 65,536 Roaring64Bitmap chunks, serializes chunks independently, and returns the final cardinality as an 8-byte long. Across 75 metric families, the deployment reduced two-year backfill time by 65% on average, improved daily runtime by 23%, and recorded no post-deployment OutOfMemoryError failures while retaining exact distinct counts.


### [Zone-Failure-Resilient OpenSearch® at Uber](https://yomu.fyi/post/zone-failure-resilient-opensearch-at-uber.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 21, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Uber describes how it made OpenSearch deployments zone-failure resilient so querying and ingestion remain available after a complete zone loss. The design combines OpenSearch’s shard-allocation awareness with Odin-based isolation groups that distribute nodes predictably across failure domains and balance roles. Clusters maintain at least three shard copies across three isolation groups, while forced awareness keeps shards for a missing group unassigned instead of triggering heavy rebalancing; this trades immediate full replication for stability in surviving zones. For manager resiliency, five cluster manager nodes and cluster.auto\_shrink\_voting\_configuration allow quorum after a zone failure plus one additional manager failure. Uber reports that isolation groups replaced uneven physical zone IDs, enabling complete shard assignment, preventing disk skew and hot nodes, and supporting green cluster health.


### [Expanding the Uber Transit Innovation Fund: meet our next cohort of recipients](https://yomu.fyi/post/expanding-the-uber-transit-innovation-fund-meet-our-next-cohort-of-rec.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 15, 2026
- Type: Announcement

The Uber Transit Innovation Fund responds to reduced transit funding by supporting public agencies and partners pursuing projects that keep communities moving. Launched with a $1 million commitment, the fund initially offered up to $50,000 to each of as many as 20 forward-thinking US transit agencies, municipalities, and regional authorities. Strong interest from US and Canadian agencies led to an expanded investment and eligibility, following an initial cohort of nine winners. The additional 26 recipients bring total awarded funding to $1.7 million, or $1,705,000, with projects spanning microtransit in Oregon, food access in Richmond, Virginia, and transportation gaps across urban, suburban, and semi-rural communities. Additional funding and recipients are scheduled to be announced by the end of the month.


### [Meet the first cohort of recipients shaping the future with the Uber Transit Innovation Fund](https://yomu.fyi/post/meet-the-first-cohort-of-recipients-shaping-the-future-with-the-uber-t.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Author: Valley Transit Authority (Santa Clara County, CA)
- Published: Jul 14, 2026
- Type: Announcement

The Uber Transit Innovation Fund will provide up to $50,000 each to 20 US public transit agencies, municipalities, and regional authorities to pilot on-demand mobility programs, with $1 million available overall. Its first announced cohort includes agencies and authorities from San Antonio, Volusia County, Polk County, Belton, Monterey, South Bend, the Quad Cities, and San Juan. Proposed projects cover late-night overflow rides, microtransit and paratransit supplementation, airport connections, curb-to-curb service, modernization of taxi vouchers, subsidized rides for opioid-use-disorder treatment, food-access mobility, and first-mile/last-mile trips to 16 rail stations. Applications remain open through June 30, 2026, with proposals reviewed on a rolling basis until funds are fully allocated.


### [Scaling Verify with Wallet for Identity Verification at Uber](https://yomu.fyi/post/scaling-verify-with-wallet-for-identity-verification-at-uber.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 9, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Uber integrated Apple’s Verify with Wallet API into its cross-app Identity Verification Platform to support government-backed digital IDs across driver onboarding, age-gated ordering, and car rental use cases. The central challenge was allowing each use case to request only its Apple-approved identity data while operating through a scalable, platform-agnostic service rather than separate integrations. Server-side configurations map Uber identity models to PassKit objects, set one-time or persistent storage intent, and validate responses using HPKE decryption, CBOR payloads, session transcripts, MSOs, device signatures, and issuer certificate chains under ISO/IEC 18013-5. A registry of IACA certificates, sourced from jurisdictional portals and AAMVA’s VICAL, supports overlapping certificate rotations, while the platform is intended to accommodate new document types and cross-platform digital credential integrations.


### [GitFarm: Git® as a Service for Large-Scale Monorepos](https://yomu.fyi/post/gitfarm-git-as-a-service-for-large-scale-monorepos.md)
- Company: [Uber](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md)
- Published: Jul 9, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

At Uber’s monorepo scale, traditional Git workflows create bottlenecks through multi-gigabyte clones, local checkouts, repeated synchronization, and independent fetch or push operations across automation systems. The post describes GitFarm, a Git as a Service platform exposed through a high-performance gRPC API that executes standard Git commands in secure, ephemeral sandboxes backed by pre-warmed repository and container pools. Each backend maintains a bare clone, receives push-based updates and periodic git fetch operations every five minutes, while clients can explicitly fetch when they need current state. The design provides a full checkout in under 500 milliseconds and reduced client-side resource utilization by over 80%, while avoiding local clones and long initial clone delays.


[Newer posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber.md) · [Older posts](https://yomu.fyi/company/uber/page/3.md)