Upwork

Lead Software Engineer, AI Data Systems

Upwork

full-time

Posted on:

Origin:  • 🇺🇸 United States

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Salary

💰 $151,500 - $215,500 per year

Job Level

Senior

Tech Stack

ApacheAWSAzureCloudGoogle Cloud PlatformPandasPythonSpark

About the role

  • Collect high-quality training data and curate 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 for LLM-based agents and autonomous AI systems
  • Lead development of infrastructure enabling experimentation, evaluation, and deployment of machine learning models in production
  • Support orchestration and real-time inference pipelines using Python and cloud-native tools, ensuring low-latency and high availability
  • Mentor engineers and foster a high-performance, collaborative engineering culture
  • Drive cross-functional alignment with product, infrastructure, and research stakeholders on progress, goals, and architecture

Requirements

  • 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, including dataset versioning, experiment tracking, and 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
  • Experience in startups, AI/ML research environments, or similarly dynamic settings is essential
  • 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 a commitment to inclusive collaboration and continuous learning