Upwork ($UPWK) is the leading tech solution for companies looking to hire the best talent, maintain flexibility, and get more done. We’re passionate about our mission to create economic opportunities so people have better lives. Every year, more than $2 billion of work is done through Upwork by skilled professionals who want the freedom of working anytime, anywhere. Top companies connecting with extraordinary talent around the globe? Upwork is how.

Are you an experienced Engineering leader who is up to the challenge of running the core of a platform that is at the center of the professional lives of millions of freelancers and clients around the world? Do you relish leading teams through solving seemingly impossible problems? Do you love identifying potential scalability issues, implementing engineering best practices, and helping your teams come up with creative solutions to both technical and organizational challenges? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Upwork is looking for a passionate, hard-working, and talented technical leader to lead the teams focused on one of Upwork’s key objectives and responsible for managing the core Marketplace user flows to help freelancers and clients on Upwork find the opportunities or hires that best fit their needs. This role is core to the business and it provides opportunities to make a truly outsized impact.

Improving the quality of the match, upleveling our ontology of work, implementing self-healing protocols to handle failure scenarios, and dramatically improving our job fill rates, are just a handful of the areas where we have significant room for improvement. As the senior leader in charge of this team, you will come to work every day knowing that your contributions will make a major difference for users who depend on the product that you deliver in order to make a living.

You will be at the forefront of the shift to remote-work. Your team will span dozens of countries and you’ll have the opportunity to lead both local and globally-distributed talent. 

Your Responsibilities:

• Be at the forefront of an effort to overhaul the Upwork Marketplace experience, improving everything from the profile creation and job application experiences, to the knowledge graph (the ontology of work) and the quality of the matches being made on the platform.

• Establish architectural principles, identify cutting-edge technologies and patterns to leverage, and continue to increase the talent density on this already strong team. Keep high performers engaged and motivated to continue doing their best work.

• Work closely with our Data Science team to apply Machine Learning models to improve the relevancy and ranking of search results.

• Drive a high standard of excellence for web service scalability and availability, while also driving high profile efforts on the front-end.

• Be in charge of the team’s technical strategy and execution, and partner closely with Product and Design, as well as with other senior leaders in Engineering, to ensure that we’re delivering the best end to end experiences for our customers.

What it takes to catch our eye:

• 10+ years of development experience managing high-performing distributed engineering teams.

• Experience in designing and developing scalable, well-tuned, and highly available software.

• Strong track record of working across team boundaries to deliver delightful customer experiences across the full stack.

How to really knock our socks off:

• Proven ability to work in a fast-paced, iterative environment and lead the parallel development and delivery of features on multiple related product areas.

• Strong focus on the customer and the business, coupled with a burning desire 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.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Our teams are widely distributed, and you will be required to communicate with technical and non-technical audiences across different cultures.