Director, AI Infrastructure & Systems

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to large, Fortune 100 enterprises with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.

Last year, more than $3.8 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.

Upwork is seeking an experienced engineering leader to manage our systems team that supports the company’s AI compute and infrastructure needs.  You'll lead initiatives supporting some of the most advanced and sophisticated clusters in the industry used to train, research, evaluate, and ultimately serve frontier AI models. We are looking for an experienced engineering manager to help lead our compute team. This team is responsible for building the platform that Upwork builds its applications on. You will be owning a compute fleet serving users and developers around the world. You will also collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to help ship reliable products quickly.

Your Responsibilities:

• Manage a team of engineers building world class infrastructure across multiple clouds
• Consult with different stakeholders to deeply understand the infrastructure and compute needs, identifying potential solutions to support frontier research and product development
• You will lead the build out of industry-leading AI clusters, partnering closely with cloud service providers
• Set strategy and oversee the development of high scale, reliable infrastructure systems 
• Hire and coach top technical talent
• Design processes (e.g. postmortem review, incident response, on-call rotations) that help the team operate effectively
• Scaling our development infrastructure to support our rapid growth and security needs
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What it Takes to Catch our Eye:

• Have 10+ years of experience in software engineering, including 3+ years of experience managing technical teams of more than 6 people
• Strong leadership ability; experience managing and growing senior engineers
• A passion for developer productivity
• Excellent communication skills to build consensus with stakeholders
• Deep knowledge of modern cloud infrastructure including Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, AWS
• Obsession with infrastructure reliability, scalability, security, and continuous improvement
• Manage and build out a diverse team of high performing infrastructure engineers.
• Set technical direction on evolving our compute and abstractions to support a growing business.
• Collaborate closely with a broad set of stakeholders, including product engineering, inference, and finance. 
• Experience with machine learning infrastructure like GPUs, TPUs, or Trainium, Have prior experience building out infrastructure teams at scale
• Coach and nurture engineers to accelerate their growth and learning.

The annual base salary for this position in California and Washington ranges from $175,000- $261,250. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum salary for this position in California and Washington, and individual base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Additionally, this position is eligible for the annual bonus plan or sales incentive plan and eligibility to participate in our long term equity incentive program

Come change how the world works.

At Upwork, you’ll shape talent solutions for how the world works today. We are a remote-first organization working together to create exciting remote work opportunities for a global community of professionals.  While we have physical offices in San Francisco and Chicago, currently we also support hiring of corporate full-time employees in 19 states in the United States. Please speak with a member of our recruitment team to determine whether you are located in a state in which we are hiring corporate full-time employees. 

At the core of our vibrant culture are shared values that form the foundation of our organization. These values revolve around trust, risk-taking, customer focus, and excellence. Our overarching mission is to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. We foster an environment where individuals are encouraged to bring their authentic selves to work, nurturing personal and professional growth through development opportunities, mentorship programs, and participation in Upwork Belonging Communities.

We take pride in providing exceptional benefits to our employees. These include comprehensive medical insurance coverage for both you and your family, unlimited paid time off, a 401(k) plan with matching contributions, 12 weeks of paid parental leave, and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan. To explore these benefits in detail, as well as gain insights into our company values, working principles, and the overall employee experience, we invite you to visit our Life at Upwork page.

Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.