I’m going to be interning for Uber this summer and placed in the Product Platform(not my first Choice). The group seems largely front end heavy, which I have no experience on nor really envisioned myself pursing as a career. The descriptions I found online seemed pretty vague about the functions of the group. Could anyone enlighten me about the (hopefully backend) roles around the group? I’ve seen Product-platform.uber.com and it’s basically not anywhere near my previous experience or my CS education.
Role is Software Engineering
Depends on where in product platform you're actually placed. Web platform is working on a new node based framework, but that's really the only "front end" in the org. Networking and experimentation are backend, dev ex is productivity tooling (probably a lot of cli stuff), and mobile architecture is probably a lot of IOS and Android platform level eng.
That makes a lot of sense, I should find out within the next few weeks. Hopefully it is one of those back-end groups. Is this org significantly smaller than other groups like Marketplace?
If you're doing an internship, your previous experience is probably not so great that you can't keep learning. My team is all switching technology at the moment, and there's a large range of ages and experiences. It's good to be flexible and embrace change, even if it's scary.
I’m on the team and I agree with previous comments that it depends heavily on the sub-team. My team, for example, does have heavy FE (web and mobile), but we also have back-end (Go) and even some systems level work. Do you know exactly which group you’ll be with? Feel free to DM me if you want more details.
Product platform org also includes the data infrastructure teams that run Hadoop, Kafka, Vertica, etc. So I'm sure there are "backend" and systems experience for you. For example, my team has 0 frontend engineers or have no front end features.
DM if you need help
Honestly feels a little bit like a bad matching when it came to group placement.