Lead Software Engineer - AI Data Systems

Help build the critical infrastructure that powers the future of intelligent, agent-driven systems at Upwork. You’ll be responsible for collecting high-quality training data, building scalable featurization pipelines, and delivering performant systems to support model training and inference at scale. 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.