Contract: Senior Backend Engineer, Search and Recommendations

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone, from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100, with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Last year, more than $3.8 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.

We're looking for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join our Al team in the Search & Recommendations domain. In this role, you will be building cutting-edge search & recommendation systems that better connect companies and talents and elevate our AI  strategies to drive significant business growth. As a senior Backend Engineer, you will have the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in the industry and contribute to innovative and customer-impacting products that shape the future of work. If you are passionate about pushing the boundaries of search and AI/ML technologies, thrive in a collaborative, results-oriented culture, and are excited about our mission, we invite you to join us.

This is an engagement through Upwork’s Hybrid Workforce Solutions (HWS) Team. Our Hybrid Workforce Solutions Team is a global group of professionals that support Upwork’s business. Our HWS team members are located all over the world.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, maintain and improve search systems and AI/ML services that scale with the growing demands of our applications and state of the art search capabilities 
• Collaborate with frontend and backend teams to design and implement API that align with business requirements and optimize backend processes to enable low-latency and high-reliability retrieval and ranking needs
• Conduct thorough code reviews and drive enhancements to boost API performance and functionality.
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for our services ensuring transparency and knowledge sharing with the team.
• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancements in software development and AI and evaluate their potential impact on our projects.
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for our services ensuring transparency and knowledge sharing with the team.
• Manage your time independently and effectively to achieve project deliverables, which may require an estimated 40 hours of effort per week.
• Communicate and collaborate frequently, proactively and effectively in English.
• Participate in project meetings and provide regular status updates.
• Participate in on-call pager duty schedules providing timely responses and resolutions to critical issues.
• Show a commitment to continuous learning and improvement in both technical and soft skill.
• Ensure consistent availability from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm PST to facilitate team collaboration and meetings.

What it takes to catch our eye:

• Strong Industry experience with large scale production grade systems as a software engineer and Indexing experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch or Apache Solr
• Strong  experience in Java programming with a record of delivering robust and high-quality code with unit tests 
• Solid understanding of API Design Principles and CI/CD 
• Exposure to machine learning concepts and workflows with an understanding of how services support machine learning models
• Excellent communication skills and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and globally distributed teams and adapt to evolving project requirements.