Sr. Engineering Manager - Upbound

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

As we scale into our next phase of growth, we are hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead our Control Planes & Ecosystem Group. In this role, you will own the strategy and execution for the customer-facing control plane experience across upstream Crossplane, Upbound Crossplane, Upbound Marketplace, official providers, extensions, and partner integrations.

Responsibilities

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.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice to Haves

• 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.