Upwork ($UPWK) is the world's largest freelancing website. Each year $1.7 billion of work happens through Upwork, allowing businesses to get more done and helping professionals break free of traditional time and place boundaries and work anytime, anywhere on projects they love. At Upwork, you'll help build on this momentum. Together, we'll create economic and social value on a global scale, providing a trusted online workplace for businesses to connect with extraordinary talent and work without limits. 

To support the processing of $1.8 billion, the Payments team maintains pay-in, pay-out systems across 180 countries, a robust escrow system and deep integrations with various payment processors. Our payment system is a strategic business differentiator and an essential part of our business.

Are you a software leader who is passionate about designing and building highly available, fault tolerant systems and helping impact the professional lives of millions of freelancers and clients around the world? Do you relish solving challenging problems? Do you enjoy identifying potential scalability issues, implementing engineering standard methodologies, and coming up with creative solutions to both technical and organizational challenges? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Upwork is looking for a collaborative, hardworking, top-tier technical leader who will spearhead the modernization of our payments systems. We continually deliver new and innovative products, and at the same time address highly complex requirements with the utmost accuracy.

Your Responsibilities:

• Lead the research and definition of your teams' technical roadmap.
• Establish and enforce architectural principles, define interface guidelines, identify the state of the art technologies and patterns to use, and increase the talent density of the team.
• Lead the implementation of select technical projects including modernization of the Payments backend.
• Partner with Upwork’s infrastructure teams and evangelize technical methodologies within the payments and freelancer services teams.

What it takes to catch our eye:

• 15+ years of development experience, 5+ years of Java and web technology experience.
• Proven ability to work with a range of steak-holders and communicate effectively with all levels of an organization.
• Deep understanding of Web technologies, Microservices, and databases.
• Significant and ongoing programming responsibilities over the past few years.

How to really knock our socks off:

• Phenomenal software design principles; make thoughtful system design decisions that will impact long term maintainability of our codebase.
• Employment history at both start-ups as well as at least one job at a recognizable consumer Internet company.
• Strong focus on the customer as well as the business, coupled with an ability to learn, respond to feedback and grow. We’re looking for people who thrive on learning new technologies and don’t believe in one-size-fits-all solutions.
• A track record advocating and winning support for technological initiatives.
• You will have strong communication skills. Our teams are widely distributed, and you'll need to interact with technical team members across different cultures and time zones.
• Desire to roll up the sleeves and write code for critical company projects.

Come change how the world works.

At Upwork you’ll help shape the future of work. From our offices in San Francisco, Santa Clara and Chicago, together we’re creating exciting new opportunities for a world of professionals. You’ll be part of a vibrant culture built on shared values: Inspire a boundless future of work, Put our community first, Have a bias towards action, and Build amazing teams. Along the way you’ll have fun and enjoy the perks of a people-first company: Work from Home Wednesday's, daily breakfast and lunch, regular in-office happy hours, top-notch benefits … and more. Check out Upwork’s spotlight on The Muse for a glimpse of our daily work/life balance.

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.

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