Senior Cloud Reliability Engineer (Kubernetes & Go)

Upbound - Job Posting; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Upbound is seeking an experienced engineer to run production cloud services at scale, focusing on reliability, observability, and incident response. You will operate Kubernetes controllers, implement monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, and collaborate closely with customers to reproduce and fix complex issues.

In this remote role, you will own high‑priority features, contribute to Crossplane open‑source work, and help standardize runbooks and post‑incident reviews.

Qualifications

• Proven experience running production cloud services at scale.
• Strong troubleshooting ability in distributed systems with observability tooling.
• Hands-on experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing.
• Experience building and operating Kubernetes controllers with API server interactions.
• Comfort working directly with customers to reproduce and fix complex issues.
• Demonstrated ownership for solving problems during incidents affecting workloads.
• Commitment to high-quality work and improving operational resilience.
• Customer empathy and focus on debuggability as a product feature.
• Clear communication and collaboration to support customers and team.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate Upbound Spaces in production across multi-tenant SaaS environments.
• Own high-priority features requested by customers and deliver new capabilities.
• Investigate and debug complex customer-side issues, including multi-control-plane scenarios.
• Produce thoughtful design documents for new initiatives and post-incident reviews.
• Support the full lifecycle of scalable cloud services from discovery to operations.
• Write Go code interfacing with the Kubernetes API with emphasis on observability and reliability.
• Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot Kubernetes services in production using metrics, logs, and traces.
• Build and maintain tooling for customer debugging, control plane health analysis, and incident-response automation.
• Create documentation, runbooks, and blog posts to support shipped features.
• Support release processes for self-hosted Spaces distributions and diagnose issues in customer environments.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for Upbound Cloud and resolve incidents end-to-end.

Skills

Production cloud ops

Troubleshooting distributed systems

Observability tools

Kubernetes controllers

Customer focus

Ownership & accountability

Quality & reliability

Communication & collaboration

Team-oriented mindset

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Upbound is seeking an experienced engineer to run production cloud services at scale, focusing on reliability, observability, and incident response. You will operate Kubernetes controllers, implement monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry, and collaborate closely with customers to reproduce and fix complex issues.

In this remote role, you will own high‑priority features, contribute to Crossplane open‑source work, and help standardize runbooks and post‑incident reviews.