Director of Engineering at Upbound

Upbound

North America - Remote·2h ago

DirectorFull-timeKubernetesAI

Salary Range

$204,000 - $276,000 /year

Estimated

This salary is estimated based on similar roles. The actual salary may vary.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Control Planes & Ecosystem to lead our Control Planes & Ecosystem Group at Upbound. This senior leadership role is responsible for scaling teams, defining long-term architecture strategy, and shaping how enterprises adopt programmable control planes through a thriving ecosystem.

Key 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.

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.