[Hiring] Director of Platform Operations – Infrastructure @Upwork

Role Description

As the Director of Platform Operations, you’ll lead the evolution of Upwork’s foundational infrastructure, ensuring our platform’s resilience, scalability, and innovation-readiness. You’ll oversee a globally distributed team driving initiatives across Kubernetes modernization, CI/CD platform services, developer tooling, and AI/ML infrastructure enablement. This high-impact leadership role requires strategic vision, operational excellence, and deep collaboration across engineering, product, and business teams to scale Upwork’s next-generation platform capabilities.

• 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, multi-tenant 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 platform-wide observability, including logging, monitoring, distributed tracing, and SLO instrumentation.
• Partner with AI platform teams to operationalize next-gen infrastructure such as GPU provisioning, MCP/Agent Marketplace, and model-serving environments.
• Recruit, mentor, and scale a high-performing, globally distributed team that fosters innovation and technical excellence.
• Represent infrastructure operations in strategic planning and architectural reviews, influencing company-wide platform investments and direction.

Qualifications

• Proven experience (10+ years) in software engineering with 3+ years leading high-performing infrastructure or platform teams.
• Deep technical expertise in cloud-native 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, self-service platforms that accelerate developer productivity.
• A growth-minded leader with exceptional communication and collaboration skills who thrives in cross-functional environments.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical coverage for you and your family
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k) plan with matching
• 12 weeks of paid parental leave
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan