Upwork is looking to leverage advanced machine learning techniques to deliver cutting-edge solutions that directly impact its global platform and user experience, driving business transformation and creating economic opportunities for professionals worldwide.
Requirements
- Masters/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, NLP, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent research experience).
- 3+ years of relevant industry experience building large scale ML systems
- Prior experience with large language models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), or agentic AI.
- Strong experience with Python, SQL PyTorch and/or TensorFlow
- Clear track record of publications in peer‑reviewed conferences or journals (e.g. ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, SIGIR, WWW etc.).
- Knowledge of distributed training techniques, and efficiency at scale (memory, latency, hardware constraints).
Responsibilities
- Analyze millions of structured and unstructured data to identify patterns and insights in user behavior and build meaningful features to improve model performance
- Design and implement efficient and reusable features, models and systems for different machine learning applications (classical & deep learned models) in low latency fashion
- Contribute to the performance and continued optimization of our recommendation systems: build machine learning models to improve understanding of user preferences, user intent and context to deliver accurate, relevant and personalized recommendations
- Collaborate with the business, analytics, and engineering counterparts to share the discovered data stories with stats, charts, and formal presentations, and finally propose recommendations to maximize the business impact.
- Build and fine‑tune large language models (LLMs), transformers, agents, and/or hybrid systems to improve relevance, semantic understanding, and user experience.
Other
- Masters/PhD degree in a related field
- 3+ years of relevant industry experience
- Ability to collaborate with business, analytics, and engineering counterparts
- Excellent communication and presentation skills
- Ability to work in a remote-first environment
