That adds up to maybe 100-200 people in my head. It's not like they rebuild every payment integration every day.
I worked for a retailer with >$2B in revenue across stores and 5 websites plus internal tools and we had about 100. And probably half were low cost contractors. Software practices sucked, deploys took forever, they had an ivory tower architecture crew and pie in the sky CTO and yet their digital products all worked fine and made tons of money. Why? Their products and branding were excellent.
The other thing Uber has to do is optimize well. It needs to state competitive with Lyft for both passengers and drivers, minimize driver churn (but not too much), optimize matching, and charge predicted fares accurately.
Uber also processes an insane number of transactions. Not quite Visa, but I'd guess it's in the top 5% of volume as a merchant.
Uber also was wasting a huge amount of time and energy and most of the engineers didn’t have anything productive to do. At least that’s what I gathered from some ex Uber folks.
Uber has scale, they are processing $15+ billion plus in rides a year. Millions of customers and millions of drivers that need tools built to service them.
