Sr. Engineering Manager

🏢 Upboundext · 📍 San Francisco, California, United States

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

🎯 Candidate Preparation Guide For Upboundext Applicants

Key Role Competencies & Evaluation Highlights

Key Role Focus:

Focuses on deep platform engineering prowess, control plane architecture, and the ability to build reliable cloud-native infrastructure abstractions (Kubernetes ecosystem).

📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

1. Treating infrastructure as immutable pets rather than ephemeral, declarative code managed via GitOps.
2. Failing to reason through failure modes of distributed systems and network partitions.
3. Lacking foundational Go programming expertise or deep Linux kernel/container runtime knowledge.

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I build infrastructure control planes that developers actually love using, leveraging declarative APIs to eliminate toil and scale cloud-native reliability.

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