Staff Solutions Architect - N.A. [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 by 1,000+ teams worldwide. We’re a Series B company backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, and we’ve raised $69M to date. Learn more at upbound.io.

As a Staff Solutions Architect at Upbound, you'll be a vital part of our go-to-market team, focusing on the post sales implementation of our products and adoption of solutions. Drawing from your deep technical knowledge and experience with implementing cloud native solutions based on Kubernetes, you will have a significant impact on driving and executing the technical implementation of Upbound's products and solutions. This will include building rapport with our new and existing customers to ensure a smooth delivery and adoption of our products. 

In this role, you will: 

• Closely partner with the Upbound pre sales team to transition customers to and through a smooth post sales implementation.
• Deeply understand customer environments and requirements, identifying their platform needs, and designing architecture and solutions that delight.
• Ensure successful adoption of Upbound and Crossplane technology into customer production environments.
• Perform technical discovery to scope customer engagements and contribute to authoring Statements of Work.
• Work directly with customers to troubleshoot and solve technical challenges relating to the implementation phase of deploying Crossplane and Upbound Cloud based control plane architectures into their production environments.
• Solve problems and improve customer deployments by writing code, fixing bugs, and building scoped features within Upbound products, the provider ecosystem, and the Crossplane core code base.
• Build and maintain a set of cloud native "reference platforms" that will help accelerate adoption and position Crossplane and Upbound as a central piece of the cloud native landscape. See as an example https://github.com/upbound/platform-ref-aws.
• Work cross-departmentally to find solutions to complex scenarios and integration issues.
• Be the technical voice of Upbound to the customer, and represent customer needs internally to influence product roadmap.
• Be the trusted technical advisor to new and existing customers by identifying and presenting ongoing technical solutions as the Upbound product suite grows.

You are a good fit if you have: 

• Written and maintained code that interfaces with the Kubernetes API, such as operators, controllers, add-ons, etc.
• Managed production Kubernetes deployments or have been responsible for deploying/managing workloads running on Kubernetes in production.
• A background in platform engineering/SRE with building an IDP (Internal Developer Portal). 
• A deep understanding of highly scaled and reliable services, solutions, and infrastructure in multiple major cloud providers.
• Excellent communication skills - must be capable of effectively engaging and leading interactions with technical and business teams, and are comfortable presenting to customer and stakeholders at varying levels of management 
• Worked directly with customers and/or open source community members to troubleshoot and solve their complex technical issues leading to successful adoption.
• Deployed and integrated the projects and tools of the Cloud Native Landscape, especially CNCF projects, into production environments.
• Incorporated modern operational and application delivery tools and methodologies into your production deployment workflows, like those from HashiCorp (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD, IaC, and GitOps.
• Programming skills in a modern language (Go is ideal).
• The ability to work closely with people in a wide variety of disciplines from a wide variety of backgrounds.
• Successfully managed multiple projects and priorities in a fast paced and dynamic environment.
• Excitement and comfort being a key part of further defining, scaling, and making this critical part of our engineering and customer solutions efforts thrive.

It is a plus if: 

• Crossplane experience is highly preferred. 
• You are actively involved or have contributed to the upstream Kubernetes community.
• You have a history of speaking at technology conferences, blogging/writing technical articles, and/or contributing to a popular open source project.
• You have worked in a startup and distributed/remote team before, and understand the unique challenges of a startup environment.
• Current CKA or CKAD certification.

 #LI-REMOTE

Why Upbound?

At Upbound, you’ll help shape the systems and strategies that drive predictable, scalable growth in a product-led company embracing usage-based models. If you're excited to build from the ground up, work with cutting-edge cloud technologies, and directly impact how revenue is generated and scaled—this is your seat at the table.

About Upbound

Upbound is pioneering infrastructure platforms for the Agentic AI Era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across more than 100 countries. The company empowers infrastructure and platform teams with Intelligent Control Planes - based on Kubernetes and Crossplane - that provision, operate, and adapt so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. Upbound is the creator and primary maintainer of Crossplane, the popular open-source framework for building cloud-native control planes, with over 100 million downloads and adoption by more than 1,000 teams worldwide. A Series B startup backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, Upbound has raised $69M to date. For more information, visit www.upbound.io.