Customer Experience Operations Lead

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 and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X; and learn more about Lifted at Go-Lifted and follow on LinkedIn. As the Customer Experience Operations Lead supporting our Voice of the Customer (VOC) program, you will help shape how we listen to and learn from millions of interactions across our marketplace. You'll manage the day-to-day operations of our customer feedback ecosystem, optimize ingestion pipelines, and ensure high-quality insights fuel smarter decisions across Upwork. This is an exciting opportunity to operate in a dynamic, cross-functional environment and directly influence how we prioritize and resolve customer pain points at scale. In this role, you will partner closely with CX, analytics, engineering, and product stakeholders to ensure our VOC systems run reliably, surface meaningful insights, and enable faster action across the organization. You will leverage your expertise to anticipate issues, streamline processes, and guide teams toward customer-centric solutions, reflecting P4 ownership, cross-functional leadership, and a proactive, quality-first approach. Responsibilities Manage and optimize daily operations of our NLP vendor (Birdie AI), ensuring all customer feedback sources are reliably ingested, categorized, and exported to the right downstream tools. Enhance and maintain NLP taxonomies, queries, and categorization models to strengthen accuracy and align insights with evolving business priorities. Monitor key data quality metrics to identify ingestion gaps, anomalies in volume or sentiment, and misaligned categorizations, escalating issues proactively before they impact stakeholders. Generate and maintain recurring feedback reports, exporting metrics on volume, sentiment, and category trends to stakeholder dashboards for consistent visibility. Validate NLP accuracy by reviewing samples of categorized comments, documenting misclassifications, and coordinating retraining cycles with analytics and vendor partners. Identify emerging issues by using filtering techniques, basic analysis, and trend monitoring to detect spikes in negative feedback or new themes requiring cross-functional attention. Maintain high-quality data hygiene by cleaning and standardizing fields, merging duplicates, addressing missing values, and ensuring consistent formatting across sources. Lead efforts to automate insights delivery through alerts, triggers, dashboards, and workflows that help teams respond proactively to relevant customer experience signals. Collaborate with CX, analytics, and engineering partners to design centralized dashboards and reporting structures that increase clarity, accessibility, and stakeholder alignment. Create training materials that empower teammates to independently interpret VOC insights, strengthening organization-wide data literacy and adoption. What it takes to catch our eye Success managing operations for VOC programs, NLP tools, or customer feedback systems within a technology or marketplace environment. Hands-on experience using and refining NLP models, taxonomies, or classification frameworks to improve accuracy and actionability. Ability to translate customer feedback into operational and product insights that reduce friction and elevate the customer experience. Proficiency with data visualization and dashboarding tools, with experience automating insights workflows and alerting mechanisms. Experience partnering with engineering and analytics teams to maintain pipelines, troubleshoot integration issues, and ensure data integrity. Strong operational mindset with the ability to balance daily system management with longer-term optimization initiatives. Clear communication and teaching skills that help non-technical stakeholders interpret, apply, and take action on VOC insights. 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 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. 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