Director of Engineering

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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 • (Desirable) Experience with Crossplane and/or Kubernetes • (Desirable) Background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms • (Desirable) Experience building multi-tenant control plane architectures • (Desirable) Startup experience in high-growth infrastructure companies • (Desirable) Passion for programmable infrastructure and AI-native systems What the job involves • Upbound is building the control plane for the modern enterprise.

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.

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 • 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 As the company behind Crossplane, the open-source CNCF project that extends Kubernetes into an AI-native cloud control plane.

Our vision extends beyond infrastructure management into an AI-native Control Fabric — where control planes become programmable, extensible, and ecosystem-driven.