Sr. Engineering Manager

About the role

Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built for the Agentic AI Era. We're the creators and primary maintainers of Crossplane, and we're building the Intelligent Control Plane-a new platform layer that makes infrastructure programmable, autonomous, and composable.

Our mission is to power the AI-native enterprise with a foundational platform layer that helps teams provision, operate, and adapt infrastructure at scale-so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. We partner with leading cloud providers, ISVs, and open-source communities to help organizations move faster with greater confidence.

Today, Upbound supports Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across 100+ countries. Crossplane has surpassed 100M+ downloads and is used by 1,000+ teams worldwide. We're a Series B company backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, and we've raised $69M to date. Learn more at upbound.io.

Upbound is building the control plane for the modern enterprise. As the company behind Crossplane, the open-source CNCF project that extends Kubernetes into an AI-native cloud control plane. Upbound enables organizations to compose, manage, and operate infrastructure and services through declarative, programmable control planes.

Upbound Cloud delivers hosted, multi-tenant control planes that power platform engineering teams at scale. Our vision extends beyond infrastructure management into an AI-native Control Fabric - where control planes become programmable, extensible, and ecosystem-driven. As we scale into the next phase of growth, we are hiring a Director to lead our Control Planes & Ecosystem Group.

As Director of Control Planes & Ecosystem, you will own the strategy and execution for the customer-facing control plane experience across:

• Crossplane: Upstream work and contributions for the open source Crossplane Project
• Upbound Crossplane: Upbound's Enterprise Distribution of Crossplane
• Upbound Marketplace: The place where Users and Customers discover content
• Upbound Official Providers and Extensions: Development and maintenance of Providers, Add-Ons, Functions, and more
• Partner Integrations: Development of Extensions with third party partners

This is a senior leadership role responsible for scaling teams, defining long-term architecture strategy, and shaping how enterprises adopt programmable control planes through a thriving ecosystem.

You will lead multiple managers and high-performing engineering teams, driving cohesion across product and user experiences.

In this role, you will

Control Plane & Enterprise Strategy

• Help define and drive the long-term vision for hosted control planes and ecosystem extensibility.
• Ensure Marketplace, UXP, APIs, and Extensions operate as a cohesive control plane experience.
• Shape how platform engineering teams compose infrastructure through Crossplane-powered abstractions.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and production-grade control planes at scale.

Ecosystem Leadership

• Own the strategy for Upbound Marketplace as the distribution layer for Crossplane providers, extensions, and control plane building blocks.
• Grow and strengthen the provider ecosystem (ISVs, cloud providers, platform partners).
• Enable extension frameworks that allow customers and partners to build on top of Upbound control planes.
• Ensure ecosystem experiences are intuitive, secure, and enterprise-ready.

Organizational Leadership

• Lead managers and managers-of-managers across multiple teams.
• Scale engineering org structure to support product velocity and ecosystem expansion.
• Establish operational rigor: roadmap planning, delivery predictability, uptime SLAs, and production excellence.
• Foster a culture of ownership, innovation, and deep technical craftsmanship.

Cross-Functional Influence

• Partner closely with Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to align ecosystem strategy with revenue goals.
• Translate enterprise customer needs into scalable control plane capabilities.
• Represent engineering in executive-level conversations around ecosystem expansion and AI-native infrastructure.

You are a good fit if you have

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including leading managers of managers.
• 5+ years building or scaling cloud-native, infrastructure, or platform engineering products.
• Deep familiarity with Kubernetes and the Cloud Native ecosystem.
• Experience building SaaS control planes or distributed systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of APIs, SDKs, declarative systems, and extensibility frameworks.
• Proven experience growing ecosystem-driven products (marketplaces, providers, plugins, or integrations).
• Track record of delivering reliable production services with strong uptime and performance standards.
• Ability to operate strategically while diving deep technically.

It is a plus if

• Experience with Crossplane and/or Kubernetes.
• Background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms.
• Experience building multi-tenant control plane architectures.
• Startup experience in high-growth infrastructure companies.
• Passion for programmable infrastructure and AI-native systems.

#LI-REMOTE

Why Upbound?

At Upbound, you'll help shape the systems and strategies that drive predictable, scalable growth in a product-led company embracing usage-based models. If you're excited to build from the ground up, work with cutting-edge cloud technologies, and directly impact how revenue is generated and scaled-this is your seat at the table.