Upwork is hiring in Lisbon, Portugal

Upwork

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 workforces 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 at Upwork.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X; and learn more about Lifted at Go-Lifted and follow on LinkedIn. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As a Senior Software Engineer on the tax engineering team, you will build and improve the services that power tax calculation across VAT, sales tax, and withholding for a global platform. You'll own meaningful pieces of the backend, contribute to frontend workflows, and collaborate closely with engineers, product, finance, and compliance partners to ship reliable, well-tested systems. This is a strong fit for someone who enjoys working through detailed business logic, integrating third-party providers, and steadily raising the quality of complex financial software. RESPONSIBILITIES: * Build, extend, and maintain backend services for tax calculation and payments, focusing on accuracy, reliability, and clean, testable code. * Contribute to frontend workflows using Vue.js or similar modern JavaScript frameworks to support internal tools and customer-facing experiences. * Develop and maintain APIs and integrations with external payment processors and tax engines, improving performance, observability, and error handling. * Partner with product, finance, tax, and compliance stakeholders to translate business and regulatory requirements into well-scoped technical work. * Improve code quality through thoughtful testing, code reviews, and AI-assisted development workflows that increase velocity without sacrificing rigor. * Investigate production issues, identify root causes, and deliver durable fixes that strengthen the reliability of tax and payments systems. WHAT IT TAKES TO CATCH OUR EYE: * Solid backend engineering experience with Java, including building RESTful APIs, working with relational databases, and deploying services on AWS. * Working experience contributing to frontend applications using Vue.js or another modern JavaScript framework. * Track record of owning project-level work end to end and collaborating effectively with cross-functional partners. * Exposure to tax, fintech, payments, or another compliance-heavy domain is a plus, paired with a willingness to learn complex business rules quickly. * Practical fluency with AI-enabled engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot or Cursor, with the judgment to review and validate outputs and a habit of sharing useful AI techniques with teammates. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Come change how the world works. Upwork is establishing its first international operational hub in Lisbon, Portugal. The new office is expected to be fully operational by Q4 2026. This role will require 3 days in office once we have an office open. This position will initially be employed through a partner to ensure a seamless hiring process while we establish the hub. Once the hub is established, there may be opportunities to transition to employment with Upwork, depending on business needs and other requirements. While employed by the partner, you’ll work as part of Upwork’s team, with access to our resources, culture, and growth opportunities. Our partner will offer competitive benefits. When Upwork’s hub is established, we will be excited to offer employment and benefits directly as business needs require.  Upwork is committed to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workforce. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or any other status protected by applicable law. We use BrightHire, an AI-enabled tool, to record interviews and summarize interview transcripts. The tool allows the interviewer to focus on the discussion and does not score or evaluate candidates or make recommendations. The interview transcripts are reviewed, and decisions are only made by humans. Candidates who prefer not to have their interview recorded through BrightHire can opt out when the interview is scheduled. To learn more about how Upwork processes and protects your personal information as part of the application process, please review our Global Job Applicant Privacy Notice and the Applicant Privacy Addendum (EEA, UK, and Switzerland). The annual base salary range for this position  is displayed below. The range displayed reflects the minimum and maximum salary for this position, and individual base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. Additionally, this position is eligible for the annual bonus plan or sales incentive plan and eligibility to participate in our long term equity incentive program. Annual Base Compensation €53.500—€77.000 EUR   To learn more about how Upwork processes and protects your personal information as part of the application process, please review our Global Job Applicant Privacy Notice

Index

YOUR MISSION About the Role We are looking for an experienced Upwork Channel Manager to take full ownership of our Upwork operation — from bidding and profile management to analytics, team leadership, and channel development. You will run one of our most important lead generation channels end-to-end, managing bids across multiple profiles and leading a team of lead generators across shifts. This is a senior operator role. You will set the strategy, execute the day-to-day, and be held accountable for real numbers — replies, qualified calls, SQLs, and closed deals.  What You Will Own Bidding & Proposal Strategy * Run the bidding operation end-to-end: bids per month across multiple profiles, with clear quality standards and no drops in view rates. Manage Connect spending: keep cost per SQL in healthy ranges and reconcile refunds from lost/closed jobs. * Own scanner configuration: weekly optimization of underperforming scanners, applying small iterative changes — cover letter variants, profile selection, smart boosting — and scaling what works. * Write and test cover letters: continuous A/B testing of length, opening lines, trust signals, portfolio anchors, and niche framing.  Profile & Channel Development * Optimize profiles for visibility and conversion: titles, descriptions, portfolios, keywords, and positioning. Align every profile with our current propositions, including AI-assisted development. * Launch and onboard new profiles: when the channel can absorb them, plan, launch, and season new profiles to keep the operation scaling. Analytics & Reporting * Track the full funnel weekly: bids → views → replies → calls → SQLs → deals, by profile, by scanner, by day-of-week, by bidder. * Investigate bottlenecks: the reply-to-call conversion is the current priority. Pull the conversation data, find the patterns, test fixes, report on results. Team Leadership * Manage the lead generation team (currently 2–3 people across shifts): set KPIs, run 1:1s, review performance, hire, onboard, and — when needed — make the hard calls on underperformers. * Build processes that scale: standardize how bids are recorded, how SQLs are qualified, how data is logged. The team needs to be measurable, not dependent on any one heroic performer. Cross-functional Collaboration * Work with Sales: hand off SQLs cleanly to the team running qualification calls.  * Work with Analytics: partner on dashboards, data exports, and attribution. YOUR PROFILE What You Bring Must-Haves * 3+ years of hands-on Upwork experience, ideally running a bidding operation for an agency or service business of $10m and more. * Proven track record of improving funnel conversion — not just running volume. You can point to specific numbers you moved. * Strong analytical skills: fluent in spreadsheets, comfortable modeling unit economics (cost per SQL, LTV, CAC), able to read funnel data and form real hypotheses. * Experience managing a lead gen or BDR-style team: hiring, onboarding, performance management, compensation design. * Deep familiarity with Upwork's mechanics: Connects, boosting, algorithm changes, profile optimization, client filtering, scanner/automation tools * Experience bidding across multiple verticals — software development, full-stack, healthcare, logistics, CRM, fintech, or similar. * Excellent written English. You will be writing and editing cover letters, proposals, and profile copy. * Process discipline. You document what you do, you record data consistently, and you expect the same from your team. * Judgment. You know when to enforce process and when to let a high performer operate their own way. Nice-to-Haves * Experience with AI-assisted proposal generation  * Familiarity with LinkedIn / Email outbound * Background in positioning software development agencies or AI-assisted development services. * Experience working with distributed teams across Eastern Europe and other time zones.

Prior Labs

WHO WE ARE Foundation models transformed text and images. Structured data - the largest and most consequential data format in the world - stayed untouched. Tables run every clinical trial, every financial model, every scientific experiment, every business decision, and no one had built a foundation model that truly understood them. Until now. What LLMs did for language, we're doing for tables. The next modality shift in AI is happening, and we're hiring the team that makes it. Momentum. We pioneered tabular foundation models and are now the world-leading organization in structured-data ML. Our TabPFN v2 model was published as a Nature cover story and set a new state of the art for tabular machine learning. Since release we've scaled model capabilities 20x+, passed 3.5M+ downloads and 7,500+ GitHub stars, and are seeing accelerating adoption across research and industry - from detecting lung disease with Oxford Cancer Analytics to preventing train failures with Hitachi to improving clinical-trial decisions with BostonGene. The hardest work is ahead. We're scaling tabular foundation models to millions of rows, thousands of features, real-time inference, and entirely new data modalities, while building the infrastructure to run them in production across some of the most demanding industries on earth. These are open problems no one else is working on at this level. Our team. We're a small, highly selective team of 30+ engineers, researchers, and GTM specialists, with backgrounds spanning Google, Apple, Amazon, DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft Research, G-Research, Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, and CERN. We're led by Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann, and Sauraj Gambhir, and advised by world-leading AI researchers including Bernhard Schölkopf and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun. We ship fast, do top-tier research, and hold each other to an extremely high bar. What's next. In 2025 we raised €9m pre-seed led by Balderton Capital, backed by leaders from Hugging Face, DeepMind, and Black Forest Labs. The next phase of growth is here, which makes this an ideal time to join. About the Role We are hiring our first Partner Manager to execute and scale our partnerships motion. You'll be the operational backbone of how we structure, run, and grow relationships with cloud providers, data and analytics vendors, and system integrators. This is a hands-on execution role - you'll be in the details of active partnerships, owning relationships and making sure commitments are met, incentives are working, and relationships translate into pipeline. Partnership Execution * Own the day-to-day execution of active partnerships across existing cloud providers, data and analytics vendors, and SI/consultancy relationships * Track commitments on both sides and ensure follow-through internally and externally * Coordinate with internal engineering teams and developer relations to make sure technical resources are deployed on partner deals effectively Deal Structure and Commercial Operations * Work on the structure of partner agreements - co-sell arrangements, referral tiers, reseller terms, and delivery incentives * Support pricing and packaging discussions with partners * Maintain accurate records of partner agreements, terms, and performance in CRM Internal Coordination * Act as the connective tissue between partnerships, direct sales, and the technical GTM team * Flag when partner commitments are getting ahead of delivery capacity * Work with the sales team to align on account ownership and ensure channel clarity Partner Development * Help onboard new partners and get relationships into a productive state quickly * Identify where existing partnerships are underperforming and surface what needs to change * Contribute to building the playbooks, templates, and processes that will scale the function What you bring * 3-5 years in a partnerships, alliances, or BD role at a data infrastructure, ML tooling, developer tools, or deep tech company. * Experience working on partner commercial structures - not just managing relationships but understanding how the incentive mechanisms work * Strong internal coordination skills; comfortable working across sales, technical, and product teams simultaneously * Detail-oriented and reliable on follow-through; partners and internal teams alike know they can count on you * Familiarity with cloud provider partner programs a strong plus Why this role is exciting * First Partner Manager at a company building a genuinely new category in AI * Direct exposure to how enterprise partnerships are structured and scaled from the ground up * Work closely with the commercial founder on a motion that will be a major growth driver * Clear path into senior partnerships or BD roles as the function scales Life at Prior Labs We're a small, ambitious team solving one of the hardest problems in AI, and we're just getting started. You'll work closely with world-class researchers and builders who care deeply about the quality of their craft, the impact of their work, and the people they work with. We move fast, we think rigorously, and we take the time to do things right. If you're excited by hard problems, motivated by real-world impact, and want to be part of building something that matters, we'd love to hear from you. We're building our teams in Berlin, Freiburg, and New York and we believe that when you're working on something as hard and exciting as TabPFN, being in the same room matters. Most of our roles are based in one of our offices but great people come from everywhere, and in exceptional cases we're open to remote. This usually involves frequent travel to one of our offices and the whole company comes together regularly for offsites to think, build, and celebrate together. Our Commitments We believe the best products and teams come from a wide range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. That's why we welcome applications from people of all identities and walks of life, especially anyone who's ever felt discouraged by "not checking every box." We're committed to creating a safe, inclusive environment and providing equal opportunities regardless of gender, sexual orientation, origin, disability, or any other trait that makes you who you are. We care about how your data is handled. Read our Recruiting Privacy Notice to see exactly what we collect, why, and how long we keep it.