Aarhus Engineering Hub Supports Uber's Global Operations

Uber Keeps On Growing In The Nordics.

Since Uber‘s launch in Stockholm in February 2013 – and with Copenhagen, Helsinki and Oslo joining in November 2014, there has been born some unprecedented demand for their services. At the moment, the company is concentrating on working hard to help the partner-drivers meet the high demand and provide a safe and reliable ride for all users.

In Denmark, Uber’s main goal is to help provide cities with a better transportation system – But they also support Uber data centres around the world from Aarhus engineering hub.

“In Aarhus, Uber employs about 25 software engineers who are building out the world class tech infrastructure, which power the Uber app globally. Recruiting for this team is very successful, but we are still looking for many more to join this team,” says Steffen Grarup, the Senior Engineering Manager of Uber Denmark.

Denmark Is Crucial For Uber’s Infrastructure

Uber Engineering Denmark office ties directly into Uber’s Core Engineering team in San Francisco, for which it develops and runs key technologies in the Compute and Storage Infrastructure platforms.

The Compute Platform manages the entire build, deploy, and execution cycle for hundreds of micro services across thousands of hosts in multiple data centres around the world.

Built around a goal oriented model – in which components incrementally get reconfigured to reach a final state and where compute jobs get scheduled to reach high utilization – Uber updates services in production more than a thousand times daily.

Finding The Best Talent In The Region

As thousands of discrete data items are captured by the Uber infrastructure every second, huge amounts of information need to be stored in a highly available and reliable fashion for easy access around the world.

The Storage Platform team has created Uber’s in-house shared datastore, which distributes data to thousands of compute nodes, to achieve high efficiency, fault tolerance and dynamic scalability.

“We’ve reached the size where we’re insourcing everything. From building out our own services for mobile crash analytics to creating our own routing and mapping data. Whatever challenge you’re looking for, chances are we have it,” says Grarup.

As it is custom at Uber, the Danish teams also build the monitoring and management tools for their products, and when something breaks they get alerted and fix it. This highly agile model yields extreme ownership and consequently high quality software.

Uber’s software stack is created entirely based on open-source software, and a variety of programming languages are used.

“We’re hiring engineers who are able to find their own problems to work on. Ideas pit against ideas and seniority doesn’t matter,” says Grarup.