Upbound - Job Posting

Role Description As a Senior Customer Support Engineer at Upbound, you won’t just resolve tickets, you'll own the customer experience from first touch to full resolution, setting the standard for what world-class technical support looks like in the cloud-native ecosystem. You’ll be a trusted technical advisor to our customers, working alongside Product, Engineering, and Customer Success to make every interaction exceptional. This role reports into the Customer Experience team at Upbound, a signal of how seriously we take support as a strategic function, not an afterthought. This is a high-impact role for someone who gets genuine satisfaction from solving hard problems, has a natural drive to help, and believes that great support is a craft not a function. - Serve as a primary technical resource for customer inquiries related to Upbound’s products Spaces, Cloud, Official Extensions, Marketplace, Registry & More delivering a “wow” experience with every single touch. - Apply a structured, methodical troubleshooting approach to diagnose and resolve complex customer issues, moving efficiently from hypothesis to root cause. - Triage, own, and drive tickets to resolution with urgency and clear communication proactively keeping customers informed every step of the way. - Identify, document, and escalate bugs and product issues to Engineering with thorough reproduction steps, collaborating closely to ensure fast resolution. - Partner with the Solutions team on complex, strategic customer requests, ensuring seamless handoffs and continuity of experience. - Capture and contribute knowledge back to the team building and maintaining a high-quality internal knowledge base using KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) methodology. - Gather and synthesize customer feedback to surface trends, advocate for product improvements, and drive process enhancements across the team. - Build or contribute to agentic tooling, automation, and internal workflows that meaningfully elevate the support experience and scale your own impact. Qualifications - 4+ years of experience in a technical support or customer-facing engineering role, ideally in a SaaS or enterprise infrastructure environment. - A natural “helper gene” you’re energized by solving problems for others and take personal ownership of customer outcomes. - Strong, systematic troubleshooting methodology you approach complex issues with a clear framework, not just instinct. - Solid experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native technologies, and infrastructure-as-code. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills you can explain deeply technical concepts to any audience without losing precision. - A customer-first mindset with a relentless drive to deliver experiences that genuinely delight. - Solid experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies — including Helm, OCI artifact distribution, RBAC, admission webhooks, and policy frameworks (OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno). - Able to drive root cause analysis independently using observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or equivalent — without needing Engineering to interpret metrics or traces for you. - Experience with vulnerability management in containerised environments — triaging CVE severity, assessing blast radius, and communicating risk and remediation timelines to enterprise security teams. Requirements - Hands-on experience with Upbound and/or Crossplane. - Familiarity with KCS (Knowledge-Centered Service) practices and methodology. - Experience building agentic tooling, support automations, or AI-assisted workflows to improve customer outcomes. - Proficiency with Unix-like shells and command-line interfaces. - Scripting skills in Python, Bash, or similar. - Startup experience you know how to operate with ambiguity and move fast. - Hands-on experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD or Flux) and familiarity with reconciliation failure modes — drift, conflicts, dependency ordering. - Background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms (IDPs) — you understand what platform teams are trying to build and why it breaks. - Working proficiency in Go — enough to read Crossplane/provider source and identify relevant fixes. Benefits - 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.

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. 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 at scale. Our 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. Ecosystem Leadership - 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 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. It is a plus if… - Experience with Crossplane and/or Kubernetes. - Background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms. - Experience building multi-tenant control plane architectures. - Startup experience in high-growth infrastructure companies. - Passion for programmable infrastructure and AI-native systems. #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.

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. 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 at scale. Our 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. Ecosystem Leadership - 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 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. It is a plus if… - Experience with Crossplane and/or Kubernetes. - Background in platform engineering or internal developer platforms. - Experience building multi-tenant control plane architectures. - Startup experience in high-growth infrastructure companies. - Passion for programmable infrastructure and AI-native systems. #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.

This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. Role Description The Strategic Enterprise Account Executive role is an outside sales position responsible for developing, managing, and closing business for Strategic Enterprise customers in the North America region and is an integral part of the field sales organization. This position will require you to develop a deep understanding of the specific challenges customers are facing to help them positively achieve their business outcomes with Upbound’s solutions. This role will work cross-functionally with product, marketing, sales development and customer success to provide a tight-knit customer relationship, account leadership and direction in both the pre-sales and post-sales processes. - Carry a sales quota that aligns with Upbound’s revenue goals. - Function as the primary point of contact and the face of Upbound for new prospects and customers. - Conduct sales activities including prospecting and developing opportunities within existing customer accounts. - Manage complex strategic enterprise sales motions with multiple prospect engagement points. - Ensure the successful rollout and adoption of Upbound products and services in partnership with pre-and-post sales engineering and support. - Take ownership of your business by documenting the buying criteria, process, and owners to ensure pipeline accuracy. - Look for and implement improvements to sales processes, tools, and materials. - Travel to customer sites and industry conferences and events as needed. Qualifications - Proven track record of consistently meeting or exceeding assigned annual/quarterly goals and targets and consistently ranked top 1-2 on your team. - Sold to large enterprise G2K companies and adept at navigating global, multi-national organizations. - Sold AI, Cloud, or Infrastructure platform oriented products. - Experience in solution and value selling in the enterprise cloud, cloud-native, and AI product spaces. - Correctly estimate qualifying opportunities based on MEDDICC. - Drive to build a business, hunger to find and close deals, and pride in the growth of the business. - Relentless focus on customer success and meeting the needs of present and future customers. - Experience building positive professional relationships with senior IT and business executives. - Clear and articulate written, verbal, online, and in-person communication skills. - Professionalism, polish, attention to detail, and strong follow-up. - A collaborative mindset and willingness to help solve problems outside of your immediate lane. - Fun in your job and enjoy what you do. Requirements - Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure, AI solutions, and/or Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Chef). - Significant experience selling disruptive technology into focused markets. Company Description 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.

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.

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.

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 Engineer (SE) at Upbound, you'll be a vital part of our pre-sales team. This role will support all pre-sales efforts in the EMEA region across multiple segments. Once a lead is discovered and qualified, the Solutions Engineer works directly with the customer to understand the technical business problem they are trying to solve. They will help customers navigate and understand the value Upbound products and solutions bring them. Solutions Engineers build credible technical relationships with our customers by listening and then clearly communicating the value proposition of our products in a way that is contextualized to the customer’s specific needs. Solutions Engineers are deeply familiar with Upbound’s product roadmap and will intuit when to sell ahead of our product roadmap and when to focus on existing solutions based on the customer’s medium and long term vision. Solutions Engineers are expected to deeply understand the key technical and economic buyer's personalities and what it will take to get them to sign a deal. In this role, you will: - Partnering with a Sales Account Executive to engage in technical discussions with customers throughout the buying lifecycle. - Working cross functionally with product marketing, and independently, to create and deliver high fidelity presentations, custom demos, sample solutions, and present use cases to guide the customer through the buying journey - Closely partnering with customers and platform builders to solve technical and business challenges which enables them to design, build and implement Crossplane and Upbound Cloud based control plane architectures. - Working directly with customers and platform builders to define, implement, and test out early proof of concepts of Crossplane and Upbound Cloud. - Collect detailed customer requirements so product and engineering can accurately estimate and resource the necessary implementation services. - The technical voice and trusted advisor to the customer and represent the customer needs internally. - Project manage the account pre and post sale to ensure a smooth and frictionless customer experience through implementation in partnership with Solutions Architect and implementation teams. You are a good fit if you have: - Worked in pre-sales, consulting, or equivalent experience in an enterprise environment. - Experience developing relationships with engineering, executive, and commercial teams throughout large organizations. - Guided customers through designing and deploying Kubernetes to their production environments. - A deep understanding of highly scaled and reliable services, solutions, and infrastructure in multiple major cloud providers. - Worked directly with customers and/or open source community members to troubleshoot and solve their complex technical issues preventing successful adoption. - Deployed and integrated the projects and tools of the Cloud Native Landscape, especially CNCF projects, into production environments. - A deep understanding of modern operational and application delivery tools and methodologies inside of production deployment workflows, like those from HashiCorp (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD, IaC, and GitOps. - 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. - Successfully identified and removed friction from the buying process resulting in a more streamlined and shortened sales cycle. - Excitement and comfort being a key part of further defining, scaling, and making this part of our sales process thrive. It is a plus if: - 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. #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.