wavePod

Get Wave AI

Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO) - The Pragmatic Engineer | Wave AI Podcast Notes

Back to The Pragmatic Engineer

Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)

The Pragmatic Engineer

Wed Apr 01 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary: Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s First CTO)

The Pragmatic Engineer
Host: Gergely Orosz
Guest: Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)
Date: April 1, 2026

Episode Overview

This deep-dive conversation charts the extraordinary journey of Thuan Pham, Uber’s first CTO, highlighting how Uber’s explosive scale was managed from a technical and organizational standpoint. Thuan shares lessons from his personal background as a Vietnamese refugee, reflections on early career choices, and the strategic decisions that shaped Uber’s now legendary engineering organization. The episode is packed with stories about rewriting the dispatch system to stave off collapse, launching Uber in China in record time, navigating organizational growth pains, transitioning to microservices, and building world-class engineering culture.

The episode is a must-listen for software engineers and tech leaders, offering candid, actionable insights on scaling teams, surviving hyper-growth, and remaining an effective technical leader in the age of AI.

Thuan’s Origin Story: Refugee Roots and a Self-Taught Engineer

[01:10–06:01]

Thuan recounts fleeing post-war Vietnam as a child, surviving hazardous journeys, and arriving in the US with no English or resources.
His interest in computers developed by chance, thanks to a friend’s IBM PC. He taught himself BASIC programming:

“I don’t like to do the same thing twice. So computer programming was perfect...” (Tuan, 06:03)
Early jobs included automating accounting work with Lotus and Dbase 3, showcasing a problem-solving drive from the very beginning.
His skills led him to MIT and then to Hewlett Packard Labs, where he quickly moved from research to a strong desire for work that users depended on.

Learning from Early Tech Industry Waves

[07:05–14:21]

Early projects at HP Labs & Silicon Graphics included pioneering interactive TV—years ahead of its time, offering practical lessons about “the world being ready” for innovation.
With NetGravity (later DoubleClick), Thuan helped build the first dynamically targeted ads for web pages.
Observed the impact of focusing on profitability vs. growth in startups:

“Sometimes you’ve got to seize the market...there’s a company that formed much later than us, but did an ad service bureau and that took off.” (Tuan, 14:34)

Lessons from the Dotcom Bust and Transferability of Skills

[15:29–19:38]

Explains the exuberance and subsequent crash of the dot-com bubble, and how fundamentally strong businesses survive market cycles:

“Talents are always talent...if people just be complacent, atrophy with time, when rough times hit, it’s very, very hard to recover.” (Tuan, 19:38)
Joined VMware pre-hockey stick, building the first versions of their software management suite, learning the value of organizational structure, and scaling.

Thuan’s Management Style: Getting Comfortable with Discomfort

[23:57–25:42]

Tracks a pattern of joining organizations when small and leaving when things get “too comfortable.”
Always looking for opportunities to do something new and learn, even if it means starting over from a VP to an IC at a new company.

Joining Uber: From Curiosity to CTO

[25:53–32:37]

Uber opportunity surfaced through reputation and past connections, not active search:

“People always come and go throughout the industry, but if you’re good with them, they tend to remember that.” (Tuan, 27:53)
Bill Gurley, recognizing Thuan’s work at NetGravity, reached out after seeing him leave VMware.

The Legendary Uber Interview

[28:30–30:57]

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s then-CEO, conducted a rigorous 30-hour interview process across two weeks, “simulating” what it would be like working side-by-side.

“After a while, I forgot I was being interviewed. It was like two people sharing ideas...” (Tuan, 28:40)
Travis meticulously covered topics like hiring, firing, code quality, design, organizational culture, and more, demonstrating a deep interest in technology as a key business driver.

Uber’s Early Engineering: Scrappy Startups, Existential Crises

[32:47–39:04]

When Thuan joined, Uber was running 30,000 rides a day with 40 young engineers; the system crashed multiple times per week.
Services were built for functionality, not scale—a feature-first approach.
Thuan’s first major focus: rewrite the critical dispatch system before New York City hit the “brick wall” of unscalable architecture.

“Without dispatch, there is nothing...We have to rewrite it in a really scalable way.” (Tuan, 35:33)
He led the team to prioritize survivability and simplicity over perfection, with ruthless focus on scalability:

“If my requirement for the engineer was build a system that will scale infinitely...we’ll die before then.” (Tuan, 39:53)

Launching Uber in China: Scaling at Warp Speed

[40:17–46:33]

Travis Kalanick issued a nearly impossible mandate: launch Uber’s entire stack in China in two months.
Compliance with Chinese regulations required building data and compute isolation from scratch.
Despite all expert estimates, the team delivered in five months, with the hardest city (“Chengdu”) first:

“By doing the hardest thing first, once you launch that, everything else is downhill.” (Tuan, 44:12)
This feat built enormous organizational confidence and resilience.

Uber’s Organization and the Microservices Explosion

[46:50–52:35]

The “program and platform” org structure was invented to untangle functional teams and move faster.
Cross-functional teams—each “owning” a slice of the product—became the model.
As Uber scaled, monolith APIs became a bottleneck. The now-famous microservices split was a necessity to unblock parallel team progress, not a planned architecture:

“No one should be blocking anybody else. No one can block anybody else.” (Tuan, 51:04)
The monolith ‘decomposition’ was continually outpaced by business growth, leading to thousands of microservices. This was later rationalized—but only became manageable after business growth stabilized.

Internal Tools & Open Source: Building What Didn’t Exist

[52:57–56:24]

Uber initially leaned on standard open source, but as demand and scale grew, they often hit breaking points (e.g., random Postgres failures).
Solution: develop internal tools like Schemaless (trip data), Jaeger (tracing), M3 (metrics), and many more—often later open-sourced.

“I remember the time where I had to go on LinkedIn begging...anybody...with Postgres knowledge...terrifying because open source, there’s no single person...willing to pay anything.” (Tuan, 54:13)

Project Helix: The Uber App Rewrite

[56:24–59:11]

“Helix” required rewriting Uber’s app from scratch for flexibility and scalability of user experiences.
Involved 6–700 engineers over 7–8 months—one of the largest app rewrites at the time.
Tight deadlines were a feature, not a bug, of Uber’s culture:

“Everything we do had a tight deadline. That’s just how the culture roll.” (Tuan, 57:18)

Naming, Promotions, and Culture: Growing Pains

[59:11–63:41]

Internal communication: Named “not a Mickey Mouse shop” after frustration with playful/unhelpful service names when onboarding engineers.
Re-defined senior engineering levels (introducing L5A/L5B grades), based on observed development plateaus and to break up the long journey from “senior” to “staff.”
Pushed radical moves like enabling internal transfers and job boards—minimizing process friction and incentivizing managers to invest in their reports’ growth, not retention by force:

“It’s not a jail. We can’t lock anybody down. Everybody have free will...” (Tuan, 65:51)

Leadership, Legacy, and Perspective

[66:11–69:44]

Thuan’s outlook centers on humility, purpose, and impact:

“When I’m gone, the thing I’m most proud is how many people remember how I was good to them or helpful to them and for how many years.” (Tuan, 67:40)
Networks, Thuan repeats, are built quietly by doing great work and being good to people:

“They came because they still enjoy working with you...there are people who work with me for five different companies over 28 years.” (Tuan, 70:19)

Building World-Class Teams: Talent is Global

[70:36–71:42]

Uber’s approach to distributed offices was talent-driven—not efficiency or cost-driven.
Offices in Denmark, Lithuania, India, and elsewhere evolved around high-caliber engineers, bringing opportunity to world-class talent everywhere.

CTO as a Strategic Role: Looking Around Corners

[90:21–94:34]

CTO’s essential jobs:
- Build high-talent, high-trust teams and culture.
- Predict and plan for future technical and organizational needs—see “around the corner.”
- Align organization and processes to future business requirements.
“When you’re in any level, your job is to see a little bit further out than your folks...if you don’t do that, then no one, it’s your job...” (Tuan, 92:43)

AI’s Impact: Software Engineering in the New Age

[85:04–89:50]

AI is dramatically boosting productivity and transforming the nature of engineering work at Fair and elsewhere (e.g., “swarm coding” with agent orchestrators).
The traits distinguishing great engineers—curiosity, innovation, fearlessness—matter even more in AI-driven environments:

“Complacency is death. The world will move faster and faster and the moment we stand still, we are falling behind.” (Tuan, 89:50)
The business impact—not raw code output—is still the most meaningful measure.

Advice for Engineers at Every Stage

[94:41–97:06]

Early years: push for the hardest challenges and accelerated learning.
Later: seek impact opportunities and stretch your skills at growing organizations.
Senior phase: Give back, develop others, and focus on broader organizational contributions.

“The earlier and harder you work early on, the better you have in the future. If you take it too easy right now, then the road in the future might be a little harder.” (Tuan, 95:14)

Notable Quotes and Moments

On leadership:
“Your job is to see a little bit further out than your folks…if you don’t do that, then no one…” (Tuan, 92:43)
On internal mobility:
“It’s not a jail. We can’t lock anybody down…why make it so hard and end up leaving the company? That’s just a silly thing.” (Tuan, 65:51)
On building a reputation:
“Just do the work, right? Don’t do the work in service of that goal—just be genuine, just be yourself…” (Tuan, 68:10)
On AI and engineering:
“To me, it is an incredibly powerful tool… you can wield the tool properly, you can do extraordinary things…” (Tuan, 90:06)
On managing scale:
“Thousands of microservices happened because every time we tried to decompose the monolith, the business was growing so fast that other teams were adding to it faster than the decomposition team could pull things out.” (Tuan, paraphrased—see 52:35–53:21, 97:14 Host wrap)

Timestamps for Key Segments

01:10 Origin story, Vietnam to US, discovery of tech
07:05 Early research/industry experiences, first lessons on innovation and timing
14:34 Lessons in startup growth/profitability vs. scaling
27:53 Getting recruited by Uber, the power of reputation
28:30 The 30-hour, two-week Uber CTO interview (Team & Culture Topics)
34:54 Uber’s existential scaling challenges, Dispatch rewrite
40:17 How Uber launched China in (almost) 2 months
46:50 Program & Platform, birth of Uber’s org model
51:03 Microservices: history, necessity, and scale consequences
54:13 Why Uber built and open-sourced infrastructure tools
56:24 Project Helix: Uber App rewrite, deadlines as culture
59:11 Naming culture, promotions restructuring (L5A/L5B)
63:41 Radical internal transfer policies, building a “non-jail” organization
66:11 Leadership, legacy, and humility
85:04 AI’s impact: swarm coding, AI-augmented engineering at Fair
90:21 What does a great CTO do?
94:41 Advice to new engineers entering the industry

Final Thoughts

This episode is a behind-the-scenes case study in scaling complex tech organizations under intense pressure. It distills decades of lessons in growth, leadership, talent strategy, and managing technological paradigms shifts (from monoliths and microservices to AI). Thuan’s career illustrates that good technology follows good people; maintaining trust, humility, and resilience are as important as any particular technical skill—even, or especially, in the AI era.

Links Mentioned:

Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter

If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and consider a rating!

Loading summary...

Transcript

Host (0:00)

When Tuan Pham joined Uber as the company's First CCO in 2013, the company had 40 engineers, did 30,000 rides per day, and the system crashed multiple times per week. He had five months before Uber's Dispatch system would hit a brick wall with no way out. Seven years later, he left the CTO of one of the most complex engineering organizations ever built. In today's conversation, we discuss Tuan's interview with Travis Kalnick for the CCO role, which lasted 30 hours, spread over two weeks, scaling through chaos, rewriting Dispatch before it collapsed, launching China in five months, and the full Apple ride known internally as Project Helix. Why Uber ended up with thousands of microservices and hundreds of internal tools because existing solutions could not handle Uber's scale at the time and many more. If you've ever wondered what it's like inside the room when a company is growing faster than its systems can handle, and what are ways to get things under control, this episode is for you. As a side note, I've been lucky enough to work at Uber while Tuan was the CTO and Tuan is the real deal. This episode is presented by Static, the unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them and our other season sponsors, Sonar and Workos.

Travis Kalnick (1:04)

Tuan, it is so good to have you here in person.

Tuan Pham (1:07)

It's my pleasure. It's so good to connect with you again after all these years.

Travis Kalnick (1:10)

And it's so good to reconnect. We worked together for almost four years at Uber, probably my first month. I already met you in some really fun, stressful circumstances during Helix, the Uber app rewrite, which was a crazy project. But before we get into any of that, how did you get started, not just in tech but in life? You had a pretty rough start.

Tuan Pham (1:31)

Yeah, I grew up in. I was born in Vietnam and I was a child, I would say, of the Vietnam war. So in 1975, when the south of Vietnam. I was from the south of Vietnam, my father was tied to the military of the south of the south. And when the country was unified, the south has lost and the north has won. And there were a fair amount of repercussions, right? People who associated with the southern regime would not have much of an opportunity growing up. Education, opportunity, all these other opportunities. That was again, the way it was at the time. That's not necessarily true right now, but that was. And my mother then made a very bold decision that she wouldn't want her two son growing up with no opportunity and so we had to flee the country. And at the time there was a massive wave of exodus called the Boat People, where people just get onto a rinkety boat, fishing boat or whatever thing they can get their place in and escape the country in the middle of the night. People did not know at the time and nobody thought about it, but the chance of survival was about less than 50%. About 2 million people left. About a million people survived the crossing because these boats are not seaworthy. And we crossed the ocean and. Yeah, but we were the lucky. We were lucky half really. But no one thought about. If people think too much about it, they probably wouldn't do it. But everyone just like, well, we need to escape. We need to, you know, give ourselves a shot of a better life. And so we did. So we, we left Vietnam. It took many try and took it depleted the entire, you know, saving of my parents because it was a scam. People would say pay up half now, half later. And then the book never shows up. And finally on the fourth try, we actually made it. And then we were lucky that we have a really good captain who actually navigate through storms and all that. And we survived even pirates from Thai. I was around, I think 11, 12 somewhere. And so we crossed that and we survived three days, four nights of the crossing of the South China Sea to Malaysia. Then we went into Malaysia. We thought we were done a week later we got tower back out and dump it in Indonesia a few days later. And that's where the government there accepted us in and put it on a deserted island at the time. And we formed a refugee camp there. So. And then we were waiting to be processed. We got interviewed by all the different countries and the US gave us a refugee settlement because we were tied to the old regime that were supported by the Americans. So we were very, very thankful to get here the land of opportunity. And we didn't know any English, we didn't have any penny to our name. We were sponsored by a church. The first set of clothing we got was from the donation closet at the church. But we have to build from the ground up. And so that was how I grew up and that's how I got here.

Tuan Pham (7:54)

very, right, very innovative laser printers, you know, workstation computer systems, all of that stuff. I was in the HP lab, which is the research lab where a lot of the really innovative stuff happened. And so it was a dream job as a student I get to work on cutting edge research with all the other PhDs around. I get to write the joint thesis for my bachelor's and my master's with the work there. That was part of the arrangement. And when I graduated HP just hired me straight into that research lab. So I became one of the researcher, although I didn't have a PhD. And after that, that was a few years of that. Then I went into the industry and write code that people would actually use. I really enjoy my time at HP Lab because you get to do cutting edge stuff. We were working on medical informatics at the time where right now you go to every doctors, all your rectors are following you. Back then we actually have a network distributed system architecture where every physician workstation that you go to, right, had your X ray and everything followed. And then you have like knowledge base that actually look at for drug interaction. Oh we actually did that research back in the mid late 80s actually. And so these are cutting edge stuff. But then the thing that I find unsatisfied, unsatisfactory at the time for me was we published great paper and then didn't go anywhere. It was not productionized. And I'm just like, I want, this is so cool. Why can't we bring it to the user? But that wasn't the setup. The setup was research lab, worry about research. And then we have like a tech fair every year and and the general manager of every product division swing by and then decide what they want to pick up and productize. And so I didn't feel empowering beyond the research phase. So I just had to go find a place where I can write code and people actually use my code. So I went to Silicon Graphics. At the time we were also trying to invent the future and we actually did a prototype of that. That was interactive tv where back then now we could take for granted a streaming video, video on demand, online game, right, Cooperative game. Back then we didn't have cell phone Internet yet and we can cobble 4,000 homes together in an 18 trial that has cable. And then we invent like network protocols and all these things. And we actually found a set top which is like tube tv, not even a flat screen TV with a set top box on top, which is a Silicon Graphics box. And we can implement online shopping, movie on video on demand.

Tuan Pham (46:50)

The program and platform came first. Yeah. And the microservices came later. And the platform and programming platform as an organization structure came first out of necessity. When I came In April of 2013 we had 40 engineer and three product managers. By the end of that year we had about 100 engineer and a dozen or so product manager. Even at that really small size, we ground ourselves to a halt with a functional org structure. Imagine those who are engineer, there are about up to eight or 10 mobile developers, a number of infrastructure engineers and a bunch of backend engineers, et cetera, et cetera and five, eight people or so at dispatch now but every feature that we want to put out has to be queued up on mobile development bandwidth, dispatch bandwidth and it become impossible to navigate trade off because every feature you want to do you have to go negotiate with so many teams, right? And so then the team wanted to move fast and start to feel that friction and complain right away. And that's a good thing, right? You know, we raised the concern and so I remember Travis and Jeff Holder and I saw that and we got together for a couple days actually. And I remember we had sticky note all the different colors, each color represent a different function engineering product designer. And we put one person name to each of the sticky note and then Travis gave a talk about what are the most important area of the business that he thinks, right? And at a time there were like 17 area that he can think of the world of Uber can carbon 17 area turned out to be a lot more than that, but at the time it was 17, we didn't have enough to fund 17, we had enough to fund seven, plus a few more. Right. So we fund seven with partially the next four and that's it. And the rest can remain empty until we hire more people and we fund it. And so that was the thing. But then as part of that process, we then put sticky note onto each of these area has to be a cross functional team because we can no longer afford to run. No, yeah, cross functional team rather than

Tuan Pham (54:13)

Yeah, I remember like for example, a very painful example of that we had to face early on was we use postgres, all right? And we got to a certain scale that postgres would randomly fail and that take our services down randomly. We don't understand it's inside the kernel. I remember the time where I had to go on LinkedIn begging people who, anybody on LinkedIn that has any knowledge of Postgres to be our consultant to help us diagnose this problem. And we spent several weeks and during that it was terrifying because I don't mind if we think we can do something of our own problem. It's terrifying when we have a major problem and we depend on somebody else and we don't know because open source, there's no single person, no single company. I'd be willing to pay anything if someone can give me an answer. But there was no one. Right? And so that was one of the motivator to kind of build our own data layers and all of that stuff as well, so that we would use this generic database and we end up using MySQL just as table Data store, all the logic on top, we have to build for our own use, right? Because then we control our own desktop and we only build the feature that we really need. Right. And so that was one of many example. And eventually we run into other brick wall of scaling. I remember in 2015, right around the holiday, I was taking a holiday trip. I go to the Airport and I, I took an Uber ride as usual. The receipt didn't come for two days after that. Right. Why is that? Things were queuing up. We weren't processing things enough. Right. And so. Yeah, but that's not a deal breaker for many people because they just ride and then receipt come later. That's fine as long as the billing and all the stuff. Even when you bill people late, they don't really mind that either. Right. But as long as the ride happened, the rest of the stuff can be processed later, but it's still not great. Okay. When I dug into it, like, our data processing capability is at capacity, right? So we have to rewrite a bunch of stuff and then our capability to monitor things is reaching a breaking point with the open source tool that we use. So the M3 has to be invented. Right. And all of that stuff. So we have to do things because we, at the scale where we broke all the open source stuff that we

Tuan Pham (71:48)

Yeah, again it comes back down to purpose. So when I do something, I try to be intentional about why am I doing something, what's my purpose of doing that? And so of course my purpose to come into Uber was hey, let's build this business. I just build a tech that support the business. And so the first couple years, 18 months, 24 months were fixing a lot of the broken stuff. Things weren't reliable, become more reliable, et cetera, et cetera, rebuild things. Basically just get things to work and work well. And then along the way, you know, these things don't end. And beginning on a particular day, it just phase in and out, right? So the phase two that will call us, my second tour of duty was scale. Worldwide scale. That was China. That was massive scales everywhere in every dimension. And so, yeah, so at each of those phase, when you're done with that phase, you ask yourself, am I still useful? Do I want to re up? Right. My commitment and energies and everything else. And so the first two phases were, no question, right? We're there to do that. And then as phase two were about to wrap up, right about 2017, we actually kind of stabilized. We're really big now. I was actually asking myself that question, am I needed here anymore? And I was actually about to wrap it up that summer because, you know, at that point we had also another SDP that was higher. And I think he's really, really great technically. And I can like feel very at peace kind of, you know, there's. There's someone who really take it on even better because the person has done even bigger thing at Google, right? Yeah. And then. But that didn't work out. And then Uber has a really rough year. So then I have to like sign myself to the third tour of duty, which is. And what is the purpose of that? You know, help the company get through the turbulent years. And I had no idea at the time when that phase would end. I just kind of know the condition for that to end, which is whenever the next CEO arrive, right. And then after that, whether that person like me, I like that person, or whatever it is, that's to be decided. But that third phase, I have to stick it through because, you know, we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to everyone along the way who have built Uber to that point, right. To. To get through that turbulent phase. So we did that. And then now when the new CEO come in, and, you know, I stayed on until 2020.

Tuan Pham (90:41)

Yeah, there are a couple of angle to this. One is build a high performance team. Right. Talent, culture, all of that, you know, whatever it is that you got to do. Put the org structure, put the, you know, develop the talent, prune, you know, bad folks out or whatever. Everything that you need to do to make sure that you have really high talent density. Because when you have team A, team A would just want to hire more A level players and yeah, they just intolerant of anybody who's not performing. Right. So when you get to, but you got to get to that concentration and then it's kind of just self protecting if you will. Right. And then of course you have to create an environment where people really trust each other and align and work really well together. Right. Because you put an all star team together doesn't mean they work really well if you don't have like the cultural alignment. Right. So that organizational side of things I've always deeply believed in, if you do that one well, then good outcome would just happen. It doesn't matter what you want to do. Right. They will just be able to come out with great result because we have great talent with great motivation. The other side is you have to look in the future and see around that corner. For example, I always think about two years out. What does great need to look like? Okay, do we have the key, you know, ingredient, if you will, talents and otherwise to actually get there, Whether it's architects, leadership, whatever. Right. And what problem are we trying to solve? What would the business look like? So, you know, the famous Wayne Gretzky quote is get to where the puck would be. So. Yes. And envision that future. And I would share this with everyone at every management level that when you're in any level, your job is to see a little bit further out than your folks. Right. Because your folks are busy working on the near term things. Right. And then you have to see, because if you don't do that, then no one, it's your job to actually do that.

Tuan Pham (94:41)

Lots of changes for folks who are entering the workforce right now. I have to acknowledge it's a very scary time because it's very bumpy. Even at our company right now, we still bring in new grad, but it comes through our intern co op channel, right? We're not in the world where we just hire massive number of new college grad like the old days anymore, right? But if great people are still finding opportunity, right? We have a healthy cohort of co op every single four months that come through, right? And the best of the best still get offered from us. Because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for years from now? Right? You have to feed the talent pipeline. And great people are great people, they will learn and grow and yeah, and so that will always, the opposite will always be there for great talent. So invest in yourself. When a student volunteer doing interest, solve hard problem early on. The earlier and harder you work early on, the better you have in the future. If you take it too easy right now, then the road in the future might be a little harder. So I think that's the key. And then when you enter the industry, it depends on, I think career phases. I would say the first five, ten years or so, find opportunity where you learn the most that push you the most. Because those are the times that you have the most energy to develop your skill and ramp up really fast. And when you get to senior engineer, staff engineer range, then you know enough to be very dangerous in terms of making a big impact. Then seek opportunity where you can make a big impact. Maybe a smaller company will allow you like a bigger stage to actually make a huge impact, right? Take some of that risk and do that. And that phase should be about using what you know and make this big impact as you can. And you will learn along the way too. And then when you get to the next phase where hopefully if you're really good, you're already at this, you know, principal, engineer, senior staff, or on the management side, senior director, vp, whatever it is. And then that point, you learn to give back, right? You learn to coach and develop people. Along the way, you'll be leading and responsible for very big things. You know, apply that knowledge to do a really great job, but also teach and bring other people along. So different phases, you should change the priority a little bit.