Senior Software 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 $3.8 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.

Upwork is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to manage and evolve our operational data platforms, while also contributing to two strategic platform initiatives:

• Developing a documentation search and indexing service leveraging OpenSearch.

• Building a centralized operational metrics reporting solution that consolidates monitoring and reliability signals.

In this role, you will combine platform engineering, data tooling, and cross-functional leadership to deliver systems that empower engineers, analysts, and executives across Upwork.

This is a long-term contract position.

Key Responsibilities:

Ops Data Platform:

• Manage and maintain operational data infrastructure, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability.

• Improve workflows for analytics teams, including query execution, scheduling, and exports.

• Define best practices around access control, governance, and usage optimization.

Documentation Search & Indexing:

•  Design and deploy a unified documentation discovery platform using OpenSearch and vector databases.

•  Build ingestion pipelines and hybrid search (keyword + semantic), ensuring relevance, freshness, and ownership visibility.

•  Integrate documentation discovery into internal tools such as Backstage.

Operational Metrics Reporting:

• Contribute to a centralized operational reporting solution consolidating platform, reliability, and business KPIs.

•  Implement drill-down dashboards for engineers, aggregated SLO/SLA views for tech leads, and executive-level KPI rollups.

•  Integrate data pipelines from Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and related observability tools.

Collaboration & Leadership:

• Partner with engineering, analytics, platform, and infrastructure stakeholders to deliver high-impact solutions.

• Mentor peers, sharing best practices in APIs, search, and observability.

• Own projects end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.

Required Skills and Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong background in platform/data engineering.

• Strong proficiency in SQL and data tooling (Redash, Looker, Mode, or similar).

• Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch and/or vector databases (ChromaDB, Pinecone).

• Familiarity with observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog).

• Proficiency in at least one backend language (Java, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript).

• Hands-on experience with API design, REST, GraphQL, and microservices architectures.

• Strong understanding of workflow automation tools and middleware platforms.

• Proven ability to drive cross-functional programs, managing priorities and dependencies effectively.

• Strong communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Experience managing PDL/Redash at scale, including multi-team governance.

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.

• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub).

• Open-source contributions in analytics, search, or observability domains.

This role is ideal for an engineer who thrives at the intersection of data platforms, search infrastructure, and observability, and wants to build systems that enable every team at Upwork to work smarter and faster.

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.