Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We help connect companies large and small with top independent talent from around the world. Simply put, our mission is to create economic opportunities so people have better lives.

Every year, more than $2 billion of work is done through Upwork by skilled independent professionals who want the freedom of working anytime, anywhere.

Upwork's Data Infrastructure team is the center of engineering excellence for standard methodologies relating to provisioning, maintenance, right-scaling, cost-effective use, use-appropriate targeting of many types of stateful storage technologies: transactional databases, document databases, cache/key-value stores, streaming data stores, etc.

A Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer with the DI team is a hyper-collaborative data infrastructure domain specialist with a strong desire (and skills) to automate!

Your Responsibilities:

• Demonstrable expertise (deployment, use) in some of the following data storage technologies: Postgres/MySQL (“on-prem”, RDS, Aurora), Kafka / Kinesis (“on-prem” or managed), ElasticSearch/OpenSearch/Mongo, Redis/Memcache, analytical databases like Snowflake/Clickhouse/Greenplum, data federation engines like Presto/Trino/Dremio/Athena.
• Prior experience with Terraform for running cloud infrastructure.
• Demonstrable familiarity with engineering workflow automation tools like ArgoCD/Workflow, AirFlow, Jenkins.
• Strong scripting experience with Python (preferred), shell (secondary).
• Significant prior exposure to cloud vendors AWS (preferred), GCP, Azure. Demonstrable knowledge of specifics of resource creation and policy (permissions) management in cloud environments.
• Ensure that the team has a ready-to-apply library of outstanding homework, templates, and decision tree that matches data usage patterns
• Keep technology vendor portfolio fresh through periodic data storage technology vendor scans, research, qualification and rating.
• Design scale-appropriate data infrastructure governance process and automations that allow transparent, zero-downtime background servicing of hundreds of systems concurrently.
• In collaboration with Data Science, Data Processing teams innovate data storage systems interfaces in support of ETL, data transformation, and data quality systems with an eye on low maintenance costs, low latency, higher throughput, and simplicity of use.
• Be the domain expert for a set of storage technologies, including an intimate understanding of query expression language/APIs, tuning, scaling, and horizontal resiliency options!

What it takes to catch our eye:

• Constantly gather information from feature development teams using our data infrastructure, identify developer experience improvement opportunities, design systems that prevent data infrastructure related incidents, and guide feature teams towards safe systems use.
• Collaborate directly with "storage" teams of various cloud providers (AWS, GCP) in driving combined innovation and engineering standard methodologies. Help design, drive, and coordinate case studies targeting improvements in the design and use of vendors' data storage systems.
• Integrate core infrastructure, information security, and other internal "building blocks" teams in constructing data storage solutions.
• Participate in multi-department risk assessment exercises and craft systemic mitigating solutions pertaining to data infrastructure security, disaster recoverability, and business continuity.
• Discover, pursue, and detail ineffective manual processes relating to the lifecycle of Data Infrastructure maintenance and use. Propose, and implement process automation, using corporate workflow automation platforms, and decision collection workflows.
• Individually build services, and expose internal APIs for these services that allow other teams, and workflows to use data infrastructure automation components.
• Design multi-department process workflows and integrations supporting data infrastructure lifecycle. Manage delivery dependencies outsourced to other teams.
• Participate in on-call, incidence mitigation sessions. Capture experiences related to manual activities and convert them into automation primitives

Come change how the world works.

At Upwork, you’ll shape talent solutions for how the world works today. We are a remote-first organization working together to create exciting remote work opportunities for a global community of professionals.  While we have physical offices in San Francisco and Chicago, currently we also support hiring of corporate full-time employees in 15 states in the United States. Please speak with a member of our recruitment team to determine whether you are located in a state in which we are hiring corporate full-time employees. 

Our vibrant culture is built on shared values and our mission to create economic opportunities so that people have better lives. We foster amazing teams, put our community first, and have a bias toward action. We encourage everyone to bring their whole selves to work and grow together through development opportunities, mentorship, and employee resource groups. Oh yeah, we’ve also got amazing benefits.

Check out our Life at Upwork page to learn more about the employee experience.   

Upwork is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. As an Equal Opportunity Employer, we never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

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