Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.  

Last year, more than $3.3 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers. 

This is an engagement through Upwork’s Hybrid Workforce Solutions (HWS) Team. Our Hybrid Workforce Solutions Team is a global group of professionals that support Upwork’s business. Our HWS team members are located all over the world.

Work/Project Scope:

• Lifecycle Automation: Design and deliver automation to package, test, deploy, and operate infrastructure globally. Build systems that enforce lifecycle patterns and eliminate manual workflows at scale.

• Cloud Infrastructure Engineering: Deploy and manage infrastructure across AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI. Architect for scale, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity with cost, performance, and security as core design constraints.

• Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD: Deliver secure, reusable infrastructure using Terraform, Packer, or Chef. Architect CI/CD pipelines using ArgoCD, Tekton, or Jenkins with GitOps workflows that support rapid, safe delivery.

• Containerization and Service Deployment: Design and deploy containerized applications using Docker, Kubernetes, and Rancher. Own service lifecycle patterns including ECS, EKS, and EC2-based deployments.

• Security and Vulnerability Lifecycle Management: Embed secure configuration, patching, and vulnerability remediation into platform automation. Use infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code to enforce drift control and reduce risk at scale.

• AI/ML-Powered Infrastructure Ops: Use AI models and agent-based systems to automate support, detect anomalies, triage alerts, and reduce human effort. Shift operational ownership from engineers to intelligent systems by default.

• Observability and Signal-Driven Automation: Build and operate system observability with tools like ELK and Prometheus. Integrate telemetry with signal-aware automation to trigger remediation, suppression, or escalation based on policy.

• Tooling and Platform Engineering: Build tools and frameworks that improve developer experience, infrastructure safety, and delivery velocity. Write systems that interact with APIs, version control, and internal platforms.

• Documentation and Engineering Hygiene: Maintain high-quality documentation for all infrastructure systems and workflows. Replace tribal knowledge with versioned, discoverable, and actionable references.

• Cross-Team Technical Leadership: Partner with application engineers, SREs, platform teams, and security to deliver shared tooling, drive adoption of standards, and scale infrastructure patterns across teams.

Must Haves (Required Skills): 

• Cloud Infrastructure and Automation: Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI APIs. Strong understanding of multi-region cloud architecture, scalability patterns, and security enforcement at infrastructure level.

• Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD: Proficient in Terraform, Packer, or Chef. Designed and maintained GitOps-based CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, ArgoCD, or Tekton.

• Containerization and Orchestration: Experience building and operating containerized services with Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, EKS, or Rancher. Familiar with deployment strategies, service discovery, and multi-cluster environments.

• Scripting and Systems Integration: Writes production-grade infrastructure automation in Python, Bash, or similar. Builds tools that interact with REST APIs, system telemetry, and structured data formats like JSON and XML.

• Production Engineering Experience: Operated mission-critical systems in production. Led incident response, implemented SLOs, and contributed to platform stability and service health.

• AI-Driven Operational Automation: Built or extended workflows using ML models or AI agents to reduce support toil, triage alerts, and automate low-signal noise handling. Comfortable integrating signals and data pipelines into system logic.

• Observability and Performance Engineering: Owned or improved system observability using tools such as ELK and Prometheus. Tuned telemetry and dashboards to increase signal quality and reduce MTTR.

• Security and Compliance Integration: Applied vulnerability management and secure configuration into infrastructure automation. Familiar with policy-as-code, CVSS scoring, and patch automation via IaC.

• Documentation and Knowledge Transfer: Maintains technical documentation, architecture notes, and runbooks as part of delivery. Prioritizes reproducibility and platform consistency.

• Execution and Ownership: Leads cross-functional initiatives with minimal oversight. Unblocks teams, drives projects forward, and takes responsibility for infrastructure quality, scale, and maintainability.

Upwork is proudly committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. 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.

Additionally, a criminal background check may be run on a candidate after a conditional offer to perform your services for Upwork is made. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with applicable law, including the California Fair Chance Act and local Fair Chance ordinances.