Director of Engineering at Upbound leading Control Planes & Ecosystem initiatives. Responsible for strategy, execution, and scaling engineering teams for AI-native infrastructure.
Responsibilities
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.
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