Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Upbound builds intelligent control planes for the AI-native enterprise and is the creator and primary maintainer of Crossplane. The Sr. Engineering Manager will lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem Group, overseeing control plane strategy, marketplace and provider ecosystems, partner integrations, architecture, and multiple engineering teams. The role also involves cross-functional collaboration, organizational scaling, and delivering reliable, scalable infrastructure products.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- Remote work arrangement
Company Overview
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