Contract: Senior Platform Engineer

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. 

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.

Upwork operates a large number of EKS clusters, including a robust Service Mesh ecosystem, enabling a decentralized application architecture designed to enhance security, resilience, observability, and control across applications. At the core of the Upwork’s Service Mesh lies the Kubernetes Orchestrator, specifically EKS, with Istio serving as the foundational mesh technology. 

In this role, you will contribute to the operations of existing installations, as well as new Kubernetes-based solutions. Collaborating with our technical user community, you will bring deep expertise to guide scalability and stability improvements early in the development lifecycle. You will work closely with Engineering teams, supporting their requests for operating and troubleshooting their services. 

We embrace diversity in knowledge and experience; people with different skill-sets and mindset comprise the platform engineering team, which aims at delivering the foundations of an efficient service delivery that has impact in our core product offering. 

Must Haves (Required Skills):

• Hands-on experience with microservices architectures and specifically discovery, service-to-service communication patterns, and high availability deployments on Kubernetes clusters.
• Knowledge and experience of observability and alerting components such as Prometheus, Prometheus Alert Manager, and Grafana
• Mid to high-level experience with at least one programming/scripting language, such Python or Bash, in an enterprise environment.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure and ability to work with components such as VPC, IAM, EC2, ELB, Route53, KMS, Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail.
• Hands-on experience with a Container orchestration platform in AWS (mandatory EKS and optionally ECS).
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure provisioning and continuous deployment with Terraform and ArgoCD.
• Working knowledge of DevOps/GitOps and best practices for modern Devops Operations and software development.
• Experience with security best practices related to infrastructure and platform design.
• Excellent communication skills to support the engineering community and troubleshoot issues.

Additional experience with the following is appreciated but not required:

• Experience with service mesh solutions, especially Istio.
• Hands-on experience with GCP cloud infrastructure.
• Supporting ML workloads in Kubernetes cloud-deployed clusters.

Upwork is proudly committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. 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.

Additionally, to the extent permitted under applicable law, a criminal background check may be required as a condition of engagement.

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