[Hiring] Senior Engineering Manager @Upbound

Role Description

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.

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• Help shape the systems and strategies that drive predictable, scalable growth in a product-led company embracing usage-based models.
• Work with cutting-edge cloud technologies.
• Directly impact how revenue is generated and scaled.