Principal Data Engineer - AI (REMOTE)

Upbound; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading innovation firm in cloud technology is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and development of advanced data platforms for AI initiatives. This role involves defining the technical vision for data infrastructure that supports AI-driven features and requires a deep understanding of both data engineering and machine learning. Candidates should have over 10 years of experience, with a strong background in building scalable data platforms and a passion for advancing intelligent infrastructure solutions.

Benefits

Flexible working hours

Health insurance

Professional development opportunities

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software/data engineering experience, including 4 years in technical leadership roles.
• Proven track record building scalable data platforms.
• Experience with large language model (LLM) applications.

Responsibilities

• Define technical vision for data platforms.
• Lead design of data pipelines for ML models.
• Architect systems that support semantic search and vector search.

Skills

Data platform development

Machine Learning infrastructure

Leadership in software engineering

Vector databases

Cloud-native architecture

Tools

Spark

Airflow

Kubernetes

Elasticsearch

Job description

Upbound is the company behind Crossplane, the open-source project that started the control‑plane revolution in the cloud native community. Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built, leading the shift toward agentic infrastructure: platforms that reason, adapt, and operate alongside AI‑native systems.

We’re seeking an exceptional Principal Data Engineer to serve as the technical leader for data infrastructure supporting Upbound’s current product suite, our AI initiatives, and intelligent control‑plane capabilities. In this role, you’ll architect and drive the development of sophisticated data platforms that power AI‑driven features, including vector search, RAG systems, and semantic search capabilities that help users discover and implement infrastructure patterns at scale. You’ll also create pipelines that process infrastructure telemetry, configuration data, and usage patterns to train models that make our control planes more intelligent and autonomous.

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive the technical vision for data platforms that support AI‑powered features in Crossplane and Upbound Spaces
• Lead the design of data pipelines that transform infrastructure and data into training datasets for ML models
• Architect vector search and RAG systems that leverage Crossplane Control Planes & Upbound Marketplace as a knowledge store
• Build data infrastructure that processes resources, extensions, and compositions for semantic search
• Establish frameworks for collecting, processing, and analyzing infrastructure configuration data
• Design data pipelines that handle Crossplane‑specific data
• Create infrastructure for indexing and searching Upbound Marketplace content, documentation, and community patterns
• Develop metrics and monitoring for AI features integrated with Upbound’s control‑plane architecture
• Design data systems that power AI agents for infrastructure provisioning & operations, helping users generate and optimize Crossplane compositions
• Create feature‑engineering platforms that extract signals from control plane operations, resource status, and reconciliation patterns
• Implement data infrastructure for training models that predict infrastructure failures, optimize resource allocation, and suggest configuration improvements
• Drive the development of knowledge‑graph representations of infrastructure dependencies and relationships

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years of software/data engineering experience with at least 4 years in technical leadership roles
• Proven track record building data platforms that support production systems at scale
• Deep expertise in both traditional data engineering (Spark, Airflow, data lakes) and ML‑specific infrastructure (feature stores, model serving)
• Experience with vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector, Opensearch, Elasticsearch)
• Demonstrated experience with LLM applications, including RAG architectures and semantic search implementations
• Understanding of Kubernetes, cloud‑native architectures, and infrastructure‑as‑code principles

Technical Expertise

• Strong understanding of data requirements for AI/ML systems: training pipelines, feature stores, and inference infrastructure
• Hands‑on experience building knowledge bases and semantic search systems for technical documentation and code
• Experience with embedding models for code and technical documentation
• Knowledge of time‑series data processing for infrastructure metrics and events
• Understanding of graph databases and their application to infrastructure dependency modeling

Leadership Qualities

• Exceptional technical judgment with the ability to navigate both the AI and cloud‑native landscapes
• Demonstrate a positive attitude and foster an environment of experimentation and innovation
• Strong ability to translate infrastructure management problems into data engineering solutions
• Passion for making infrastructure management more intelligent and accessible through AI
• Deep empathy for platform engineers and understanding of their operational challenges
• Have direct experience with Crossplane and Upbound products
• Experience building AI features for developer tools or infrastructure platforms
• Understanding of enterprise compliance requirements for infrastructure platforms
• Knowledge of policy engines

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 pioneers infrastructure platforms for the Agentic AI Era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers in more than 100 countries. We empower 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 $69 M to date. For more information, visit www.upbound.io.

As set forth in Upbound’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.