Senior Product Marketing Manager

Upbound; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Upbound is seeking a Senior Product Marketing Manager in San Francisco to own go-to-market for AI inference infrastructure. You will align open source roots with a commercial product strategy, speaking to platform engineers, VPs of Eng, and CIOs.

You will drive messaging, competitive strategy, and end-to-end launches on a weeks- rather than quarters-long cadence, while enabling sales with plays, ROI models, and customer stories.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in B2B enterprise software product marketing, with infrastructure or data platform exposure.
• Proven enterprise go-to-market that closed real revenue and describes deal impact.
• Technical depth in AI/inference, cloud infra, and Kubernetes ecosystem awareness.
• Experience marketing open source projects alongside commercial products.
• Ability to take a new product to market in a rapidly evolving category.
• Hands-on copywriting and published messaging delivered by you.
• Comfort operating under speed and ambiguity with executive-facing communication.

Responsibilities

• Define positioning, messaging, value framework, and proof for AI inference portfolio.
• Shape competitive and market strategy; monitor landscape and craft defensible POV.
• Lead end-to-end launches including analyst briefings and sales enablement.
• Develop enterprise buyer fluency: CIOs, VPs of Eng, VPs of AI, platform teams.
• Create sales plays, discovery questions, objections, ROI models and customer stories.
• Input pricing and packaging aligned to enterprise buying and budgeting.
• Bridge open source projects with commercial product narratives for coherence.
• Represent the company publicly as a spokesperson in events and media.

Skills

B2B enterprise marketing

Messaging and positioning

Open source marketing

AI/inference depth

Pricing and packaging input

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

Upbound builds control planes for cloud and AI infrastructure. We created Crossplane and donated it to the CNCF, where it is a graduated project used by platform teams around the world. We are applying that same model to AI inference. Upbound is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager that will own go-to-market for that work. You will help define how enterprises understand our commercial product and our open source roots. The community narrative and the enterprise narrative have to reinforce each other without collapsing into each other. We are looking for someone who has done enterprise product marketing in growth stages and who is familiar with the Pragmatic Marketing discipline. You will need to be customer obsessed and be able to talk to a platform engineer to a VP of Engineering and VP of AI and who has worked inside an open core company.

In this role you will...

• Positioning and messaging for our AI inference portfolio. The message architecture, the value framework, and the proof behind every claim we make.
• Competitive and market strategy. You track the AI inference and infrastructure landscape, arm the field, and hold a defensible point of view on where the category is going.
• Launches, end to end. Narrative and press through analyst briefings through sales enablement, on a release cadence measured in weeks rather than quarters.
• Enterprise buyer fluency. Persona and journey work for CIOs, VPs of Engineering, VPs of AI, and the platform teams who evaluate us.
• Sales enablement sellers actually use. Sales plays, discovery questions, objection handling, cost and ROI models, customer stories.
• Pricing and packaging input, grounded in how enterprises actually buy and budget for AI infrastructure.
• The open source to commercial path. The relationship between what the project does and what the product does, and the narrative that differentiates each.
• Customer obsessed. You are a named spokesperson. You brief analysts, prep executives, and show up on stage, on podcasts, and in the community.

You are a good fit if you have...

• 8+ years in B2B enterprise software product marketing, with meaningful time on infrastructure, developer, or data platform products sold to technical buyers.
• Enterprise go-to-market that closed real revenue. You can describe deals your messaging influenced, the buyer roles in the room, and what changed because of the work you did.
• Genuine technical depth. Working knowledge of AI and Inference, cloud infrastructure, and how modern software gets deployed and operated, with awareness of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Open source and commercial experience in the same organization. You have marketed a project and a product side by side. You understand community trust, the open core line, contributor and maintainer dynamics.
• Zero to one in an emerging category. You have taken a new, technically ambitious product to market before the analysts had a name for it.
• Writing you did yourself. You ship copy.
• Comfort with speed and ambiguity. Our releases ship in weeks. The AI infrastructure market is moving quickly.
• Trust with engineers, and senior sales leaders.
• Direct experience marketing AI or ML infrastructure, including inference serving, GPU capacity, or MLOps.
• Fluency in the CNCF and/or PyTorch ecosystem
• Training in a value messaging discipline such as Command of the Message, or an equivalent framework you have actually operationalized.
• You have been the first or only PMM on a product and built the function from nothing.