Director, Control Planes & Ecosystem

Upbound - Job Posting; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 210,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Upbound is seeking a Director to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem group, owning strategy for hosted control planes and marketplace expansion. You will guide multiple teams, shape architecture, and drive enterprise adoption of programmable control planes across Crossplane and Upbound offerings.

You will collaborate with Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to translate enterprise needs into scalable platform capabilities, while ensuring reliability, security, and enterprise readiness.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term vision for hosted control planes and ecosystem extensibility.
• 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.
• Partner with Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to align ecosystem strategy with revenue goals.

Job description

Upbound is seeking a Director to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem group, owning strategy for hosted control planes and marketplace expansion. You will guide multiple teams, shape architecture, and drive enterprise adoption of programmable control planes across Crossplane and Upbound offerings.

You will collaborate with Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to translate enterprise needs into scalable platform capabilities, while ensuring reliability, security, and enterprise readiness.