Director of Engineering
Upbound
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: Anywhere in North America
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Job Level
About the role
- 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
- Lead multiple managers and high-performing engineering teams, driving cohesion across product and user experiences.
- 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.
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Remote work options
- Professional development opportunities
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
KubernetesCloud NativeSaaS control planesdistributed systemsAPIsSDKsdeclarative systemsextensibility frameworksproduction servicesuptime standards
Soft Skills
engineering leadershipstrategic thinkingtechnical depthteam managementcross-functional collaborationroadmap planningdelivery predictabilityoperational rigorecosystem strategy alignmentcustomer needs translation