Senior Engineering Manager

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in California.

📋 Description

• Define and lead the long-term vision for hosted control planes and the extensibility of the ecosystem.

• Ensure that Marketplace, UXP, APIs, and Extensions function as a unified control plane experience.

• Influence how platform engineering teams construct infrastructure through Crossplane-powered abstractions.

• Promote reliability, scalability, and production-grade control planes on a large scale.

• Own the strategic direction for Upbound Marketplace as the distribution layer for Crossplane providers, extensions, and control plane components.

• Develop and enhance the provider ecosystem, including ISVs, cloud providers, and platform partners.

• Enable extension frameworks that allow customers and partners to build on Upbound control planes.

• Ensure that ecosystem experiences are intuitive, secure, and ready for enterprise use.

• Lead teams of managers and managers-of-managers across multiple groups.

• Scale the engineering organization structure to support product velocity and ecosystem growth.

• Establish operational rigor encompassing roadmap planning, delivery predictability, uptime SLAs, and production excellence.

• Cultivate a culture of ownership, innovation, and exceptional technical craftsmanship.

• Collaborate with Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to align ecosystem strategy with revenue objectives.

• Translate the needs of enterprise customers into scalable control plane capabilities.

• Represent engineering in executive-level discussions regarding ecosystem expansion and AI-native infrastructure.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers.

• More than 5 years of experience in building or scaling cloud-native, infrastructure, or platform engineering products.

• Extensive knowledge of Kubernetes and the Cloud Native ecosystem.

• Experience in building SaaS control planes or distributed systems at scale.

• Strong grasp of APIs, SDKs, declarative systems, and extensibility frameworks.

• Demonstrated success in growing ecosystem-driven products (such as marketplaces, providers, plugins, or integrations).

• Proven ability to deliver reliable production services with high uptime and performance standards.

• Capability to operate strategically while also engaging deeply with technical aspects.

• Experience with Crossplane and/or Kubernetes is advantageous.

• A background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms is beneficial.

• Experience in developing multi-tenant control plane architectures is a plus.

• Startup experience within high-growth infrastructure companies is advantageous.

• Enthusiasm for programmable infrastructure and AI-native systems is a plus.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunity to influence systems and strategies that drive predictable, scalable growth.

• Engage with cutting-edge cloud technologies.

• Direct impact on revenue generation and scaling.

• Work in a product-led company that embraces usage-based models.