Senior Software Engineer

Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built for the Agentic AI Era. We’re the creators and primary maintainers of
Crossplane
, and we’re building the
Intelligent Control Plane
—a new platform layer that makes infrastructure
programmable, autonomous, and composable
.

Our mission is to power the AI-native enterprise with a foundational platform layer that helps teams provision, operate, and adapt infrastructure at scale—so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents
. We partner with leading cloud providers, ISVs, and open-source communities to help organizations move faster with greater confidence.

Today, Upbound supports
Fortune 500 companies
and platform engineers across
100+ countries
. Crossplane has surpassed
100M+ downloads
and is used by1,000+ teams worldwide
. We’re a
Series Bcompany backed by
GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital
, and we’ve raised$69M
to date. Learn more at upbound.io

Upbound is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help us build and operate Upbound Spaces, the multi-control-plane management software at the heart of the Upbound Platform.

As part of the Spaces team, you’ll help us scale Upbound to reliably support thousands of control planes while extending enterprise-grade control plane management and operations across both cloud and on-premises environments. Our team is growing, and this is an opportunity to make a meaningful engineering impact across both product development and production operations.

For this particular opening, we’re focused on growing our engineering presence in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, and are prioritizing candidates who are currently based in, or able to work from, one of those two markets.

• Actively build and operate Upbound Spaces in production, troubleshooting and resolving issues across multi-tenant SaaS environments, as well as contributing to Upbound's open-source projects, including Crossplane.
• Take ownership of building features in high demand by Upbound's customers and deliver new functionality that will delight and amaze our users.
• Investigate and debug complex issues in customer environments, including multi-control plane scenarios, resource reconciliation problems, and performance bottlenecks.
• Communicate through thoughtful and thorough design documents for new initiatives and detailed post-incident reviews that drive system improvements.
• Support the full project lifecycle for highly scalable and reliable services running in a cloud environment – discovery, analysis, architecture, design, review, documentation, building, migration, automation, deployment, production-readiness, and ongoing operational support.
• Write and maintain Go code that interfaces with the Kubernetes API, such as operators, controllers, add-ons, etc., with a focus on observability, debuggability, and operational excellence.
• Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot our Kubernetes services in production, using metrics, logs, and traces to identify and resolve issues quickly.
• Build and maintain operational tooling for debugging customer environments, analyzing control plane health, and automating incident response.
• Author documentation, user guides, runbooks, and blog posts to support and promote new features that you release.
• Support the software release cycle for Spaces self-hosted distributions, including diagnosing issues in customer-managed deployments.
• Participate in on-call rotation to support Upbound Cloud, responding to incidents and driving them to resolution.

• Have experience operating production cloud services at scale: monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous improvement of service reliability.
• Have strong debugging skills across distributed systems, including…