Remote Director of AI-Native Control Planes & Ecosystem

Upboundext; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 250,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Job summary

Upbound is hiring a Director to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem Group, owning strategy and execution for customer-facing control planes across Crossplane, Upbound Crossplane, Marketplace, and official providers. You will drive enterprise adoption, scale teams, and shape the ecosystem to deliver programmable infrastructure at scale.

The role requires 10+ years in engineering leadership, deep Kubernetes experience, and a track record of building SaaS control planes.

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.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term vision for hosted control planes and ecosystem extensibility.
• Ensure Marketplace, UXP, APIs, and Extensions provide a cohesive control plane experience.
• Shape infrastructure composition through Crossplane-powered abstractions.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and production-grade control planes at scale.
• Own strategy for Upbound Marketplace as distribution for Crossplane providers and extensions.
• Grow and strengthen the provider ecosystem (ISVs, cloud providers, partners).
• Lead organizational growth: roadmaps, delivery rigor, uptime SLAs, and excellence.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Cloud-native

Kubernetes

SaaS platforms

Ecosystem strategy

APIs & extensibility

Product collaboration

Scaling teams

Communication

Strategic planning

Job description

Upbound is hiring a Director to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem Group, owning strategy and execution for customer-facing control planes across Crossplane, Upbound Crossplane, Marketplace, and official providers. You will drive enterprise adoption, scale teams, and shape the ecosystem to deliver programmable infrastructure at scale.

The role requires 10+ years in engineering leadership, deep Kubernetes experience, and a track record of building SaaS control planes.