Strategic Account Executive - Upbound

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.

About the Role

The Strategic Enterprise Account Executive role is an outside sales position responsible for developing, managing, and closing business for Strategic Enterprise customers in the North America region and is an integral part of the field sales organization. You will partner with our demand generation, solutions engineering, and product teams to guide prospective customers through a solutions sales journey of modernizing their cloud platform architecture. This position requires developing a deep understanding of customer challenges to help them achieve business outcomes with Upbound’s solutions.

This role will work cross-functionally with product, marketing, sales development, and customer success to provide a tight-knit customer relationship, account leadership, and direction in both pre-sales and post-sales processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Carry a sales quota that aligns with Upbound’s revenue goals.
• Function as the primary point of contact and face of Upbound for new prospects and customers.
• Conduct sales activities including prospecting and developing opportunities within existing customer accounts.
• Manage complex strategic enterprise sales motions with multiple prospect engagement points.
• Ensure successful rollout and adoption of Upbound products and services in partnership with pre- and post-sales engineering and support.
• Take ownership of your business by documenting buying criteria, process, and owners to ensure pipeline accuracy.
• Look for and implement improvements to sales processes, tools, and materials.
• Travel to customer sites and industry conferences and events as needed.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of consistently meeting or exceeding assigned annual/quarterly goals and targets (consistently ranked top 1-2 on your team).
• Experience selling to large enterprise G2K companies and adept at navigating global, multi-national organizations.
• Experience selling AI, Cloud, or Infrastructure platform-oriented products.
• Experience in solution and value selling in enterprise cloud, cloud-native, and AI product spaces.
• Ability to correctly estimate qualifying opportunities based on MEDDICC framework.
• Drive to build a business, hunger to find and close deals, and pride in business growth.
• Relentless focus on customer success and meeting the needs of present and future customers.
• Experience building positive professional relationships with senior IT and business executives.
• Clear and articulate written, verbal, online, and in-person communication skills.
• Professionalism, polish, attention to detail, and strong follow-up.
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to help solve problems outside of your immediate lane.

Nice to Have

• Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure, AI solutions, and/or Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Chef).
• Significant experience selling disruptive technology into focused markets.

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.