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Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam
Gautam Korlam, former Uber principal engineer and Gitar co-founder, joins the podcast to discuss scaling engineering teams, the challenges of monorepos, and how AI is reshaping developer productivity.
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Stream the Latest Episode
Listen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify and Apple . See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and a summary at the bottom.
Brought to You By
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 This Episode
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!
Takeaways
Interesting parts of the conversation:
1. Submit Queue: Uber bult a complex merge system to dela with the large number of commits, where each commit had to run long-running CI tests. It’s a problem that smaller and mid-sized companies don’t have, but Uber had: and so they scratched their own itch.
2. Local Developer Analytics (LDA): years ago, Uber started to measure the experience that devs had. Like how long did a build take, locally? How much CPU is used? They used this data to improve internal tooling.
3. Developer experience as a product team. Gautam’s team operated like a classic product team: except their customers were Uber’s internal developers. Gautam believes this is how all successful platform teams should work.
4. AI changing software development: this is happening. “Vibe coding” leads to faster prototyping. Gautam believes junior engineers will thrive with AI tools because they will hit the ground running faster, and will be free of biases that hold back more experienced developers.