Director of Engineering, Upbound

• 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

Desirable

• 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:
• 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
• 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