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DirectorFull-timeKubernetesAI
Salary Range
$204,000 - $276,000 /year
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.
Benefits
- ★Opportunity to shape the systems and strategies that drive predictable, scalable growth in a product-led company.
- ★Work with cutting-edge cloud technologies and directly impact how revenue is generated and scaled.
- ★Join a high-growth startup backed by top-tier investors.
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