Sr Lead AI Research Scientist, AI Foundations

Upwork Inc.'s (Nasdaq: UPWK) family of companies connects businesses with global, AI-enabled talent across every contingent work type including freelance, fractional, and payrolled. This portfolio includes the Upwork Marketplace, which connects businesses with on-demand access to highly skilled talent across the globe, and Lifted, which provides a purpose-built solution for enterprise organizations to source, contract, manage, and pay talent across the full spectrum of contingent work.

From Fortune 100 enterprises to entrepreneurs, businesses rely on Upwork Inc. to find and hire expert talent, leverage AI-powered work solutions, and drive business transformation. With access to professionals spanning more than 10,000 skills across AI & machine learning, software development, sales & marketing, customer support, finance & accounting, and more, the Upwork family of companies enables businesses of all sizes to scale, innovate, and transform their work forces for the age of AI and beyond.

Since its founding, Upwork Inc. has facilitated more than $30 billion in total transactions and services as it fulfills its purpose to create opportunity in every era of work. Learn more about the Upwork Marketplace  and follow us onLinked

In ,Facebook ,Instagram ,Tik Tok , andX ; and learn more about Lifted atGo-Lifted and follow onLinked

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The AI Foundations team is responsible for core research and development around training, evaluation, and deployment of AI models including but not limited to custom Large Language Models (LLMs) and other Generative AI systems to support Uma, Upwork’s flagship AI model. We are a team of passionate AI researchers, engineers, and infrastructure specialists building towards highly reliable and intelligent AI systems to support the world’s largest marketplace for work.

As a Sr Lead AI Research Scientist within the AI Foundations Team, you will play a pivotal role in designing and researching novel algorithms for building reliable AI models and collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and product leaders to turn research into transformative impact within complex customer-facing AI products. A suitable candidate for this role can work effectively bottom up and take research projects from ideation to publication, and we also list some topics of interest below.

Your work will form the backbone for development of Upwork’s core AI capabilities as well as enabling complex AI products that involve embedding-based retrieval loops and multi-agent setups. You will also represent Upwork as a thought leader within the AI space by publishing and presenting state-of-the-art AI research at top AI conferences.

Responsibilities:

• Research core algorithms for AI systems within topics that are core to Upwork’s mission of building reliable AI to help humans do work faster and better.
• Prioritize research into building production-grade customer-facing AI models, with special emphasis on methods to evaluate AI outputs and measure+mitigate reliability gaps such as AI uncertainty and hallucinations. For other topics of interest please look below.
• Work cross functionally with other engineering teams to integrate research results into complex systems that include embedding/retrieval systems and/or multi-agent setups for transformative downstream product impact.
• Own research projects from start to finish, from ideation to hypothesis testing to POC building to final compilation of results and publication.
• Consider the effects of projects across multiple teams and proactively manage conflicts. Work together with partner teams to achieve cross-departmental goals and satisfy broad requirements.
• Collaborate and publish with other machine learning researchers and data scientists on novel AI research at top AI conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR.
• Stay current with the latest advancements in ML/AI research, and disseminate information across the company as appropriate to raise the bar on ML/AI literacy across all Upwork business units.
• Mentor junior researchers and engineers and lead research projects with medium-to-large teams to achieve larger-scale seminal results.
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