Director, Machine Learning - Search & Recommendations
U
UpworkE-commerce
21 U.S. statesFull-TimeDirector
Salary211,250 - 385,000 USD per year
Apply NowOpens the employer's application page
Job Details
- Required Skills
- Distributed Systems
Requirements
- Significant experience leading engineering teams in high-scale environments
- Strong track record of delivering search, recommendations, ranking, or retrieval systems that drive meaningful business results
- Deep technical fluency in distributed systems
- Deep technical fluency in data pipelines
- Deep technical fluency in search architecture
- Deep technical fluency in modern machine learning infrastructure
- Ability to guide architecture decisions and mentor senior engineers and managers
- Proven success leading integrated teams of software engineers and machine learning engineers
- Building strong partnerships across product, data science, and executive stakeholders
- Ability to operate effectively at multiple altitudes, translating technical depth into strategic clarity
- Making sound decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Strong applied understanding of AI-native engineering workflows
Responsibilities
- Define and drive the technical strategy for Upwork’s Search & Recommendations platform, aligning engineering investments with long-term business goals, marketplace performance, and platform scalability.
- Lead, grow, and develop a high-performing organization of software and machine learning engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, inclusion, high standards, and continuous learning.
- Deliver a unified Search & Recommendations platform that powers matching experiences across client and talent journeys, including search, recommendations, conversational experiences, and agentic workflows.
- Modernize search infrastructure by guiding the migration from legacy systems to scalable, maintainable, and high-performance architectures with clear APIs, observable pipelines, and strong experimentation support.
- Partner closely with product, ML, data science, design, and senior leadership to prioritize roadmaps, navigate tradeoffs, and translate complex platform decisions into measurable business outcomes.
- Champion engineering excellence through strong practices in system reliability, latency, data integrity, responsible AI development, and operational health across critical marketplace systems.
- Establish clear operating mechanisms, metrics, and team rhythms that improve execution, support long-range planning, and track platform health, engineering effectiveness, and business impact.
View Full Description & ApplyYou'll be redirected to the employer's site
