Uber India Engineering team enabling changing global consumption patterns

Uber’s India tech talent is supporting a surge in demand from eaters and restaurants on UberEats as millions around the world change consumption patterns and stay at home to help contain the spread of COVID-19.

The engineering team in Hyderabad is working on initial steps to onboard restaurants for UberEats globally such as food menu ingestion, payment experience, and compliance. This team has built products using computer vision and machine learning (ML) to seamlessly onboard restaurant menus. Its agile technology is now speeding up the process to onboard a surge of restaurants onto the Eats platform.

 The team in March alone experienced a ten-fold increase in restaurant onboarding requests from the US and other global markets. The engineering team enabled more restaurants to transition from a physical to a cloud kitchen format so they could continue their services during lockdowns across various cities. 

Naga Kasu, Engineering Director and Hyderabad Site Lead, Uber, comments, “At Uber, we believe in building locally and living globally. COVID-19 has represented a unique situation that requires an on-the-fly problem-solving approach. Despite the challenges of working remotely for an extended period, our teams have shown great discipline to handle massive workloads resiliently. I remain confident that the rich talent base of the Indian IT ecosystem will continue to support new requirements by business and users globally as we collectively battle COVID-19.”

Haider Sabri, Global Engineering Head for Uber Eats, says, “The Eats engineering team in Hyderabad is integral to enabling access to our UberEats platform for millions of eaters, restaurants and delivery partners globally. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and its challenging effects on the way people move around and get food, we have a profound responsibility to leverage our minds and technology to help people through this challenge. We are proud to see the Hyderabad engineers truly play a big role in meeting that challenge.”

Based in Hyderabad, a distributed tech site for Uber, the Uber Eats Engineering team manages the Eats platform in 6000 cities in 45 countries. This team uses advanced computer vision, automation, Machine Learning(ML), Optical character recognition (OCR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to seamlessly onboard restaurant menus onto Uber marketplace. Responsible for all backend operations, the Eats Hyderabad engineering team reduces restaurant onboarding time by efficiently creating an accurate representation of a restaurant’s menu, thereby shortening its onboarding process.