The CTO Podcast with Fexingo · 2026-07-18 · 10 min
In this episode of The CTO Podcast, Lucas and Luna dive into Uber's massive architecture overhaul of its dispatch engine. Initially built for 10 million trips a day, the system hit a ceiling as demand tripled. The team had to re-architect from a monolithic matching service to a distributed event-driven system using Apache Kafka and custom state machines. Lucas walks through the concrete changes: how they partitioned city-level data, implemented geohash-based load balancing, and reduced matching latency from 4 seconds to under 500 milliseconds. Luna presses on the engineering trade-offs, like the decision to sacrifice strict FIFO fairness for throughput. They also discuss the organizational challenges: coordinating 80 engineers across 5 teams, and the 18-month migration with zero downtime. The episode closes on a reflection about when to rebuild versus patch - a decision every CTO faces.
Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.
How Airbnb Rebuilt Its Search for 100 Million Listings72 / 100How GitHub Migrated 100 Million Repositories to a New Storage Engine76 / 100How Dropbox Rebuilt Its Sync Engine for 700 Million Users85 / 100How Skyscanner Migrated 300 Microservices to Event-Driven Architecture85 / 100How Palantir Rebuilt Its Foundry Ontology for Government AI Deployments85 / 100
