Director of Engineering

Role Overview

• 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
• Lead multiple managers and high-performing engineering teams, driving cohesion across product and user experiences.
• 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.
• 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.

Tech Stack

• Cloud
• Distributed Systems
• Kubernetes
• Open Source

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Remote work options
• Professional development opportunities