The opportunity
Upwork Inc. 's (Nasdaq: UPWK) family of companies connects businesses with global, AI-enabled talent across every contingent work type including freelance, fractional, and payrolled.
What you'll do
Innovate: Drive the roadmap for next-generation AI-powered search,: recommendation, and matching systems — including retrieval, ranking, personalization infrastructure, and the shared model and feature foundations that multiple product surfaces build on.
Strategize: Own the AI/ML product strategy and roadmap, making deliberate: tradeoffs between long-term platform investments and near-term surface-specific wins so teams build on a common foundation rather than duplicating work.
Apply cutting-edge AI to solve high-impact customer problems, including but: not limited to: NLP and intent understanding to better interpret what users are looking for
Embedding-based and neural retrieval for deeper contextual matching
Personalized ranking
Real-time indexing for fresher, more relevant results
What they're looking for
- Own core models and evaluation systems: Set strategy for human labeling programs, offline evaluation frameworks, and online experimentation, and establish a unified data strategy for shared labels, features, and outcomes.
- Collaborate: Lead cross-functional alignment across product, engineering, ML,: data science, analytics, design, and operations, moving work forward through clarity and trust rather than authority.
- Measure success: Define instrumentation, key metrics, and operating cadences that connect system-level insights to measurable product improvements.
- Stay on the cutting edge: Track emerging AI techniques and tools and bring them into your work early, keeping our search and recommendation capabilities ahead of the curve.
