Navigating Growth and Mentorship at Uber

Supported by Our Partners

• Sentry — Error and performance monitoring for developers.

• The Software Engineer’s Guidebook: Written by me (Gergely) – now out in audio form as well.

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In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I am joined by former Uber colleague, Gautam Korlam. Gautam is the Co-Founder of Gitar, an agentic AI startup that automates code maintenance. Gautam was mobile engineer no. 9 at Uber and founding engineer for the mobile platform team – and so he learned a few things about scaling up engineering teams.

We talk about:

• How Gautam accidentally deleted Uber’s Java monorepo – really!

• Uber's unique engineering stack and why custom solutions like SubmitQueue were built in-house

• Monorepo: the benefits and downsides of this approach

• From Engineer II to Principal Engineer at Uber: Gautam’s career trajectory

• Practical strategies for building trust and gaining social capital 

• How the platform team at Uber operated with a product-focused mindset

• Vibe coding: why it helps with quick prototyping

• How AI tools are changing developer experience and productivity

• Important skills for devs to pick up to remain valuable as AI tools spread

• And more!

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:11) How Gautam accidentally deleted Uber’s Java Monorepo

(05:40) The impact of Gautam’s mistake

(06:35) Uber’s unique engineering stack

(10:15) Uber’s SubmitQueue

(12:44) Why Uber moved to a monorepo

(16:30) The downsides of a monorepo

(18:35) Measurement products built in-house 

(20:20) Measuring developer productivity and happiness 

(22:52) How Devpods improved developer productivity 

(27:37) The challenges with cloud development environments

(29:10) Gautam’s journey from Eng II to Principal Engineer

(32:00) Building trust and gaining social capital 

(36:17) An explanation of Principal Engineer at Uber—and the archetypes at Uber 

(45:07) The platform and program split at Uber

(48:15) How Gautam and his team supported their internal users 

(52:50) Gautam’s thoughts on developer productivity 

(59:10) How AI enhances productivity, its limitations, and the rise of agentic AI

(1:04:00) An explanation of Vibe coding

(1:07:34) An overview of Gitar and all it can help developers with 

(1:10:44) Top skills to cultivate to add value and stay relevant

(1:17:00) Rapid fire round

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• The Platform and Program split at Uber

• How Uber is measuring engineering productivity

• Inside Uber’s move to the Cloud

• How Uber built its observability platform

• Software Architect Archetypes

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See the transcript and other references from the episode at ⁠⁠https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast⁠⁠

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