In 2018, Uber expanded its small but growing presence in Toronto by creating a 20-person tech shop that operated out of a coworking space at Queen and Spadina.
Today, the tech hub is housed inside one of the top four floors of Uber Canada’s Toronto headquarters at 121 Bloor Street East, a WELL-certified workplace with the vibrant neon signage, kombucha on tap, and mini putt you’d expect at a modern tech company office.
“I see Toronto being a strategic location for the company well into the future.”
It’s not your typical regional outpost. The tech shop was named in 2019 one of the company’s eleven global tech hubs, as part of $200-million investment in the Canadian market. With over 350 employees based at the headquarters, almost half are part of the tech hub.
Five years later, one thing is clear—they’ve been busy.
The Toronto tech hub has played a critical role in developing many of Uber’s latest tech features. To Brian Hartley, a born and bred Torontonian who serves as Uber’s Toronto tech hub site lead and senior manager of engineering, the city itself is a big part of the equation.
“The really interesting thing about Toronto is that it’s a very large, diverse, multicultural city that is growing fairly aggressively,” Hartley said. “I think that really helps us as a company connect deeper with a broader population.”
Riding the city’s talent surge
Uber approaches its tech hubs as prioritized investment areas, and Toronto was the eighth location they opened around the world. It’s a key location where the company has a critical mass of experienced staff, and where Uber sees major growth potential.
To build that critical mass, you first need talent, and Toronto’s got it in spades. The city consistently ranks among North America’s top tech talent hubs, fueled by its immigrant-friendly policies as well as the density of world-class universities in the Greater Toronto Area.
“As a University of Waterloo grad, I’ve seen what great talent can come out of a top engineering program, but there’s tons of great schools all over the world, and we have a really good concentration here in Toronto,” Hartley said.
Uber runs recruiting trips to universities around the world, including across Ontario, sending teams to conduct interviews and present tech talks to students. The company also shares tech blogs that showcase its latest projects, aiming to draw interest from the local talent pool.
That’s how Uber found Erin Gallagher. Also born and raised in Toronto, Gallagher is the first female engineer hired at the local tech hub. She was named a Canadian Developer 30 Under 30 shortly before joining Uber in 2019, and is now a staff software engineer at the hub.
In her five-plus years at the hub, Gallagher has played a key role in developing and leading some of Uber’s most recent products. Among them is Bites, a TikTok-like short-form video feed in the Uber Eats app.
Bites is designed to replicate the sensory experience of being in a restaurant. Gallager explained that the concept for Bites was developed after the company’s insights revealed that 70 percent of people have ordered from a restaurant they discovered on a delivery app.
“We know that 45 percent of users who come to the Uber Eats app have no idea what they want to order, and that can be for a lot of reasons—there are just so many options,” Gallagher said. “When users watch food videos, they get a literal gut reaction. They just know without knowing why: ‘That looks good, and I want to eat that right now.’”
Gallagher explained that Uber partners directly with merchants to create the videos, and uses an algorithm to feed the most relevant restaurant videos to users based on their location and food preferences.
Cooking up innovation
Bites launched in Toronto in mid 2024, and Uber plans to expand it to other markets. According to Gallagher, choosing Toronto to test the product was not just a matter of proximity.
There are close to 10,000 restaurants in Toronto, according to data compiled with Google Maps, which translates to 3.4 restaurants per 1,000 residents. Toronto’s diverse and thriving food culture made it the perfect choice for the global launch of Uber Eats back in 2015. Toronto also already had a large and loyal user base familiar with the company’s ridesharing service.
Today, Uber still considers Toronto to be a strategic launchpad for some of Uber’s latest features.
Hartley explained that Toronto’s highly diverse population provides Uber with valuable insights across different demographics. The city’s cultural variety also makes it a prime location for testing different cuisines, dietary preferences, and consumer behaviour.
“The Toronto market is tech-savvy, but not as tech-saturated as San Francisco or New York, so we aren’t just building products that work for tech employees. We can build products that work for a diverse population,” Gallagher added.
Feeding off of Toronto’s startup spirit
In addition to Bites, Uber’s Toronto tech hub is also responsible for creating allergy safety features within the Uber Eats app. Launched in the spring, this suite of features includes disclaimers on store detail pages indicating if a restaurant can accommodate food allergies and a special instructions field dedicated to allergy requests.
Outside of Uber Eats, the hub has also worked on several other features for the ridesharing platform. Among these are Group Rides, a feature that allows multiple people from different locations to share one car and split the bill. The team is also developing Uber’s video ads, which are an increasingly key component of Uber’s global growth strategy.
Gallagher noted that while Uber is a large company, the Toronto tech hub operates with the agility of a startup when developing these features. “We’re building products that have a huge impact, and we move really quickly,” Gallagher said.
She described the hub’s approach to releasing new products as “an iterative process,” where the 140-person tech team continually refines their work to stay adaptive to its customers’ needs. Gallagher said this reflects Uber’s focus on balancing the big picture with the finer details when it comes to launching new products.
“The most important thing is that we’re trying to solve customer problems,” she added. “We want to learn from customers as quickly as possible. Once we have an idea and put it out there, we see how customers are interacting with it, and then we adapt based on feedback and improve the product.”
Hartley sees this startup-like approach as deeply connected to Toronto’s broader ecosystem. He believes the city’s talent, innovation and grit are making Toronto a crucial driver of Uber’s long-term strategy.
“Uber has huge growth potential, and we’re moving into new and innovative businesses and partnerships,” Hartley said. “I see Toronto being a strategic location for the company well into the future.”
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Learn more about Uber’s tech hub in Toronto and careers here.
All photos provided by Uber.