Upwork - Lead Platform Operations Engineer

• Operate and improve shared Cloud infrastructure across multiple providers, accounts, and environments, with a focus on availability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. • Manage the infrastructure lifecycle, including provisioning, configuration, patching, upgrades, capacity planning, backup validation, recovery testing, and decommissioning. • Build and maintain reusable infrastructure using Terraform Enterprise or Terraform Cloud. Improve module quality, testing, versioning, policy enforcement, and drift management. • Use configuration management tools such as Chef or Ansible to maintain consistent systems and reduce reliance on manual changes. • Improve infrastructure reliability through actionable monitoring, alerting, service health indicators, operational runbooks, and tested recovery procedures. • Participate in the production on-call rotation, lead complex infrastructure incident response, and convert incident findings into preventive controls and automation. • Own and improve network infrastructure across cloud and corporate environments, including VPCs, routing, DNS, load balancing, private connectivity, segmentation, firewalls, VPNs, switching, office networks, and wireless access. • Ensure reliable and secure connectivity between employees, offices, cloud environments, platform workloads, and approved external services. • Establish consistent network architecture, observability, change management, documentation, and recovery practices in partnership with Corporate Technology and Security. • Operate EKS infrastructure end to end, including cluster and node lifecycle, autoscaling, networking, ingress, DNS, storage integration, upgrades, capacity, security, observability, and recovery. Help converge traditional cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes runtime infrastructure through common automation, lifecycle controls, reliability standards, and ownership. • Support infrastructure controls required for security reviews, audits, and SOX compliance. Ensure evidence is accurate, repeatable, and backed by durable operational processes. • Build operational tooling in Python, Go, Bash, or a comparable language to reduce manual work and improve recovery speed. • Identify recurring operational work, obsolete infrastructure, configuration drift, and unsupported systems. Drive automation, remediation, consolidation, or retirement. • What It Takes to Catch Our Eye • Deep experience operating production infrastructure across multiple cloud providers, accounts, and environments. • Advanced Terraform expertise, including reusable module design, remote state, dependency management, upgrades, policy controls, and drift remediation. • Strong knowledge of Linux systems, infrastructure lifecycle management, configuration management, patching, backup, recovery, and capacity planning. • Strong network engineering experience across cloud and corporate environments, including routing, DNS, load balancing, segmentation, firewalls, VPNs, private connectivity, switching, and enterprise Wi-Fi. • Deep hands-on experience operating Kubernetes and Amazon EKS at scale, including cluster lifecycle, node groups, autoscaling, CNI networking, ingress, storage, upgrades, observability, and incident response. • Experience diagnosing failures across infrastructure, operating systems, Kubernetes, applications, and network boundaries. • Experience with infrastructure and network observability, operational dashboards, incident response, root cause analysis, and corrective action. • Strong automation and scripting skills in Python, Go, Bash, or a comparable language. • Working knowledge of security, audit, and compliance requirements in production environments. • Ability to make sound technical decisions, explain risks and tradeoffs, and influence engineers across organizational boundaries. • A record of mentoring engineers, improving operational practices, and turning recurring problems into reusable solutions. • Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools for troubleshooting, automation, and documentation, with appropriate review before production use. • Come change how the world works. • Upwork is establishing its first international operational hub in Lisbon, Portugal, and this role will require 3 days per week in office. • We’re proud to offer benefits that go beyond the basics, including healthcare coverage for you and your family, life insurance, meal allowance, mental health support, a wellness reimbursement program, and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan.