Director of Engineering [REMOTE]
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.
About the role
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.
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.
Qualifications
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.
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.