Principal Product Manager, Reputation & Trust

Company: Upwork ($UPWK)

Employment Type: [Not Specified] Location Type: [Not Specified] Salary: [Not Specified]

Position Overview

Upwork is the world’s largest work marketplace, connecting businesses with highly skilled professionals worldwide. Our AI-powered platform has facilitated over $20 billion in economic opportunity for professionals globally.

As a Principal Product Manager within Upwork’s Customer Experience & Trust (CX&T) organization, you will spearhead strategic product initiatives aimed at bolstering trust, safety, and marketplace integrity. Your primary focus will be on Upwork’s Reputation product, where you will lead a transformative, end-to-end strategy for a transparent, two-sided reputation system designed to empower both freelancers and clients. This is a unique opportunity to fundamentally shape the foundation of user trust within a two-sided marketplace, offering high visibility and significant cross-functional impact.

You will leverage your extensive Trust & Safety experience to craft solutions that proactively combat fraud, abuse, and bias, fostering secure and equitable interactions across our global marketplace. While Reputation will be your core focus, you will also have the chance to influence broader Trust & Safety initiatives, collaborating closely with cross-functional teams including Design, Data Science, Engineering, Operations, Legal, Branding, and Go-To-Market.

This role requires strategic foresight, adaptability, and a proven history of developing and scaling complex, trust-centric products within two-sided marketplaces.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Ownership: Take strategic ownership of multiple long-term initiatives within Upwork’s CX&T organization to improve platform usability, safety, trust, and integrity.
• Vision Translation: Translate ambiguous strategic visions into clear, measurable outcomes that enhance user trust and marketplace differentiation.
• Reputation Framework Leadership: Lead the strategy and execution for Upwork’s new two-sided reputation framework across multiple releases and stakeholder groups.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with Engineering, Design, Research, and Marketplace Product stakeholders to define feature requirements and deliver high-quality, scalable systems.
• Framework Development: Develop frameworks for evaluating reputation structures (e.g., badge logic, skill tagging algorithms, and review systems), iterating continuously based on performance signals.
• Evolving Protections: Collaborate with Marketplace Product, Trust & Safety, and Customer Support teams to evolve freelancer protections tied to badge tiers and ensure accountability through new client standards.
• Go-to-Market Strategy: Lead communication and rollout strategies with go-to-market partners to ensure successful adoption across the freelancer and client base.

Requirements

• Product Management Experience: 8+ years of product management experience, with a specialization in trust, safety, security, or integrity-focused product areas.
• Cross-functional Influence: Demonstrated ability to collaborate with and influence cross-functional partners to align roadmaps, articulate trade-offs, and drive company-wide outcomes.
• Marketplace Expertise: Deep product leadership experience in two-sided marketplaces, ideally in areas related to trust, safety, or reputation systems.
• Execution Track Record: Proven track record of driving strategy and execution for complex, high-stakes platform infrastructure with long-term business impact.
• Data Science Collaboration: Experience working with Data Science teams to define algorithmic signals and performance metrics for quality and reliability.
• Mindset: Comfort operating with high ambiguity and high accountability, possessing a scrappy mindset and a bias for clarity and action.

Company Information

Upwork is the world’s largest work marketplace, connecting businesses with highly skilled professionals worldwide. From entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 enterprises, companies trust Upwork’s platform to access expert talent, leverage AI-powered work solutions, and drive meaningful business outcomes.

Upwork’s AI-powered platform has facilitated over $20 billion in economic opportunity for professionals worldwide. With professionals spanning 10,000+ skills, including AI and machine learning, software development, sales and marketing, customer support, finance and accounting, and more, Upwork empowers businesses of all sizes to scale, innovate, and build agile teams.

Come change how the world works. At Upwork, you’ll shape the future of work for a global, remote-first workforce, creating economic opportunities for professionals.