Director of Engineering REMOTE

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 building the control plane for the modern enterprise. As the company behind Crossplane, the open-source CNCF project that extends Kubernetes into an AI-native cloud control plane. Upbound enables organizations to compose, manage, and operate infrastructure and services through declarative, programmable control planes.

Upbound Cloud delivers hosted, multi-tenant control planes that power platform engineering teams  vision extends beyond infrastructure management into an AI-native Control Fabric — where control planes become programmable, extensible, and ecosystem-driven.

As we scale into the next phase of growth,
we are hiring a Director to lead our Control Planes & Ecosystem Group .

As Director of Control Planes & Ecosystem
, you will 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

This is a senior leadership role responsible for scaling teams, defining long-term architecture strategy, and shaping how enterprises adopt programmable control planes through a thriving ecosystem.
You will lead multiple managers and high-performing engineering teams, driving cohesion across product and user experiences.

In this role, you will…

Control Plane & Enterprise Strategy

• 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.

Organizational Leadership

• 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.

Cross-Functional Influence

• 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.

You are a good fit if you have…

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including leading managers of managers.
• 5+ years building or scaling…