Lead Software Engineer

Upwork

full-time

Posted on: 9/5/2025

Location: 🇺🇸 United States

✨ AI Apply

💰 $151,500 - $215,500 per year

Senior

ApacheAWSAzureCloudGoogle Cloud PlatformPandasPythonSpark

About the role

Design and implement systems to collect and curate high-quality training datasets for supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning use cases
Build scalable featurization and preprocessing pipelines to transform raw data into structured inputs for AI/ML model development
Partner with ML engineers and researchers to define data requirements and production workflows that support LLM-based agents and autonomous AI systems
Lead the development of infrastructure that enables experimentation, evaluation, and deployment of machine learning models in production environments
Support orchestration and real-time inference pipelines using Python and modern cloud-native tools, ensuring low-latency and high availability
Mentor engineers and foster a high-performance, collaborative engineering culture grounded in technical excellence and curiosity
Drive cross-functional alignment with product, infrastructure, and research stakeholders, ensuring clarity on progress, goals, and architecture
Build scalable, performant systems to support model training and inference at scale

Strong software engineering background with deep experience in building data collection, transformation, and featurization pipelines at scale
Proficiency in Python, including async programming and concurrency tools
Experience with data-centric frameworks such as Pandas, Spark, or Apache Beam
Familiarity with ML model development workflows and infrastructure (dataset versioning, experiment tracking, model evaluation)
Experience deploying and scaling AI systems in cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
Proven success operating in highly ambiguous environments such as research labs, startups, or fast-paced product teams
Track record of working with or alongside high-caliber peers in top engineering teams, research groups, or startup ecosystems
Growth mindset, strong communication skills, and commitment to inclusive collaboration and continuous learning
Experience with orchestration and real-time inference pipelines and modern cloud-native tools
Experience mentoring engineers and fostering a collaborative engineering culture