Sr. Engineering Manager

🏢 Upbound · 📍 San Francisco, California, United States

⚡ Direct Talent Broker Referral

Why apply through CandidatesReach?

✔ Tailored Executive Endorsement Letter: Highlight your real strengths and verified background directly to hiring leads.

✔ Your Preferred Screening Terms: Choose between a 1-minute quick phone screen or scheduled email calendar.

✔ $500 Cash Hiring Bonus: Receive $500 direct cash reward after 30 days of active employment.

Position Summary & Responsibilities

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. Learn more at upbound.io

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. Upbound Cloud delivers hosted, multi-tenant control planes that power platform engineering teams at scale.

The Management Plane is how customers experience all of it. It is the unified API surface, the interface they work in, the catalog they discover content through, and the systems that connect, license, and bill everything they run. As we scale into the next phase of growth, we are hiring a Senior Manager to lead this group.

Areas of Ownership

Hub — The Upbound Hub API, which indexes and

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Upbound Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Testing deep mastery of cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes extensibility, and control plane engineering.

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Confusing basic container orchestration with enterprise platform engineering architecture
2. Showing weak foundational understanding of Go or Kubernetes API machinery
3. Dismissing the importance of developer experience (DevEx) in infrastructure design

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I build robust, self-service cloud platforms that empower developers through declarative control planes without sacrificing operational guardrails.

🔒 Free Candidate Preparation Access

Unlock Preparation Priorities & Alignment Hook

🤝 Talent Broker Referral · $500 Bonus Included

Apply for Sr. Engineering Manager

Setup your contact terms & referral note to get recommended directly to the hiring lead at Upbound.

⚡ Continue with Google (Instant Setup)

or with email

Already have an account? Sign in here