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.

 The Senior Director of Product Management for Matching sits at the nexus of the Upwork marketplace. This role is highly visible, critical to the growth of Upwork, and responsible for user experiences that define success and satisfaction for millions of clients and professional talent. More than most, this role must straddle the front end and back end in order to deliver excellent experiences to clients and professional talent. At Upwork’s core lies a two-sided marketplace composed of projects and professional talent. Search and matching systems stitch the two sides of this marketplace together. As Upwork grows, matching becomes more demanding and more complex and the opportunity to improve the matching becomes more crucial and more rewarding. 

 Your Responsibilities:

• You will manage a team of product managers responsible for user experiences including job search, job recommendations, talent search, talent recommendations, and proposal management. 
• You will also be responsible for directly leading the search engineering roadmap and shaping the data science roadmap, which provides the various search, ranking, and inference capabilities required to deliver excellent matching experiences to users. 
• In this role, you will lead a large and transformative effort to rebuild not only the matching systems of Upwork but also the rules and norms of the marketplace itself.
• You will solve long-standing and difficult user problems by breaking down many of the fundamental assumptions that went into the design of Upwork’s marketplace.
• You will build entirely new experiences that address the emerging needs of Upwork’s largest and most demanding customers. 
• You will be responsible for constructing and managing user satisfaction measures, which capture the perspicacity and persuasiveness of Upwork’s matching systems. 

What it takes to catch our eye:

• Past experience managing and mentoring teams delivering great search experiences–especially semantic search experiences–to end users
• Familiarity with and advocacy for search and discovery best practices as borrowed from ecommerce
• The ability to translate user needs into search engineering and data science requirements.

How to really knock our socks off:

• You are able to create a sense of belonging for distributed teams
• You have experience managing two-sided marketplaces, especially marketplaces with wildly diverse participants or offerings