Warren Van Winckel

Director of Engineering, AI Platform at Upwork

Lynden, Washington, United States

About

I’m a Director of Engineering with 25+ years of experience building distributed systems and leading engineering teams. At Upwork, I lead the AI Platform team and work across the company to build the AI Gateway powering AI capabilities throughout the platform. My focus is designing scalable systems and enabling teams to deliver AI features with speed and reliability. Previously at Headroom and Red Hat, I built cloud infrastructure, backend systems, and developer platforms from early development through production scale. I care about building high-trust engineering cultures where teams operate with ownership, clarity, and strong execution. I stay hands-on with architecture and system design. Core focus: AI platforms, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and engineering leadership. Tech: Go, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, PostgreSQL, Linux, CI/CD.

Experience

  • Director of Engineering, AI Platform at Upwork
    Dec 2023 - Present · 2 yrs 7 mos

  • Headroom Inc. (United States)
    • Director of Engineering
      Nov 2022 - Dec 2023 · 1 yr 2 mos

    • Principal Software Engineer
      Dec 2021 - Nov 2022 · 1 yr

  • Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat
    Jun 2019 - Nov 2021 · 2 yrs 6 mos

  • Technical Architect at HCL Technologies
    Jan 2016 - Jun 2019 · 3 yrs 6 mos

  • Senior Software Tools Engineer at Ericsson
    Feb 2007 - Dec 2015 · 8 yrs 11 mos