Upwork is seeking a Lead Software Engineer (AI Data Systems) to build the critical infrastructure that powers the future of intelligent, agent-driven systems. The role aims to support the development of AI/ML models by collecting high-quality training data and building scalable systems for model training and inference at scale.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering background with deep experience in building data collection, transformation, and featurization pipelines at scale.
- Proficiency in Python, including async programming and concurrency tools, as well as data-centric frameworks such as Pandas, Spark, or Apache Beam.
- Familiarity with ML model development workflows and infrastructure, including dataset versioning, experiment tracking, and model evaluation.
- Experience deploying and scaling AI systems in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Proven success operating in highly ambiguous environments such as research labs, startups, or fast-paced product teams.
- A track record of working with or alongside high-caliber peers in top engineering teams, research groups, or startup ecosystems.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement systems to collect and curate high-quality training datasets for supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning use cases.
- Build scalable featurization and preprocessing pipelines to transform raw data into structured inputs for AI/ML model development.
- Partner with ML engineers and researchers to define data requirements and production workflows that support LLM-based agents and autonomous AI systems.
- Lead the development of infrastructure that enables experimentation, evaluation, and deployment of machine learning models in production environments.
- Support orchestration and real-time inference pipelines using Python and modern cloud-native tools, ensuring low-latency and high availability.
- Mentor engineers and foster a high-performance, collaborative engineering culture grounded in technical excellence and curiosity.
- Drive cross-functional alignment with product, infrastructure, and research stakeholders, ensuring clarity on progress, goals, and architecture.
Other
- Growth mindset, strong communication skills, and a commitment to inclusive collaboration and continuous learning.
- Ability to work in a remote-first environment.
- Willingness to undergo a criminal background check upon a conditional job offer.
- Commitment to Upwork’s values of trust, risk-taking, customer focus, and excellence.
- Eligibility to work in the United States.
