Job Title

Director of Platform Operations Infrastructure Upwork ($UPWK) is the worlds human and AIpowered work marketplace that connects businesses with highly skilled, AIenabled independent talent from across the globe. From entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 enterprises, companies rely on Upworks trusted platform and its mindful AI companion, Uma, to find and hire expert talent, leverage AIpowered work solutions, and drive business transformation. With ondemand access to professionals spanning more than 10,000 skills across AI & machine learning, software development, sales & marketing, customer support, finance & accounting, and more, Upwork enables businesses of all sizes to scale, innovate, and build agile teams for the age of AI and beyond. As the Director of Platform Operations , youll lead the evolution of Upworks foundational infrastructure, ensuring our platforms resilience, scalability, and innovationreadiness. Youll oversee a globally distributed team driving initiatives across Kubernetes modernization, CI/CD platform services, developer tooling, and AI/ML infrastructure enablement. This highimpact leadership role requires strategic vision, operational excellence, and deep collaboration across engineering, product, and business teams to scale Upworks nextgeneration platform capabilities. Responsibilities Lead global operations for core infrastructure platforms, including Kubernetes (EKS), developer environments, CI/CD systems, and enterprise integrations, ensuring performance, reliability, and security. Define and execute the roadmap for secure, multitenant infrastructure that powers engineering and AI/ML workloads across the company. Drive automation for build and release processes, incident response, and compliance readiness while maintaining strong reliability standards. Oversee platformwide observability, including logging, monitoring, distributed tracing, and SLO instrumentation. Partner with AI platform teams to operationalize nextgen infrastructure such as GPU provisioning, MCP/Agent Marketplace, and modelserving environments. Recruit, mentor, and scale a highperforming, globally distributed team that fosters innovation and technical excellence. Represent infrastructure operations in strategic planning and architectural reviews, influencing companywide platform investments and direction. What It Takes to Catch Our Eye Proven experience (10+ years) in software engineering with 3+ years leading highperforming infrastructure or platform teams. Deep technical expertise in cloudnative systems, Kubernetes, CI/CD platforms, and distributed systems operations. Experience designing and scaling AI/ML platforms for model training, deployment, and monitoring. Demonstrated success in building reusable, selfservice platforms that accelerate developer productivity. A growthminded leader with exceptional communication and collaboration skills who thrives in crossfunctional environments. This position will initially be employed through a partner to ensure a seamless hiring process while we establish the hub. Once the hub is established, there may be opportunities to transition to employment with Upwork depending on business needs and other requirements. While employed by the partner, youll work as part of Upworks team, with access to our resources, culture, and growth opportunities. Interested in building your career at Upwork? Get future opportunities sent straight to your email. Individuals in this role must be within reasonable commuting distance of Toronto, and will be required to report to an office 3 days per week. #J-18808-Ljbffr