Upwork Channel Manager

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.