Senior Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Agentic AI

Upwork Inc.

📍 toronto, on, Canada

Full-time IT & Technology Posted June 08, 2026

Job Description

About the Role We’re seeking a

Senior Lead Machine Learning Engineer

to architect, ship, and scale the next generation of agentic intelligence across Upwork. You will lead end‑to‑end development of AI agents and the platform that powers them—from LLM training and evaluation to runtime orchestration, safety, and developer APIs. This is a hands‑on, high‑impact role at the intersection of applied research and platform engineering, enabling internal teams and external developers to build reliable, safe, and high‑performing agents on Upwork.

Responsibilities

Build Agentic Intelligence.

Design and implement multi‑agent systems (planning, tool‑use, memory, debate/critique, reflection) with robust guardrails and recovery strategies.

Develop protocol‑aware agents and services that interoperate cleanly with developer tooling (e.g., agent frameworks and protocols such as MCP).

Own reliability at scale: deterministic execution where ne...