Sr. Engineering Manager [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. 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 Sr. Engineering Manager 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. In this role, you will… 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.