Senior Software Engineer

Upbound - Job Posting; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Upbound is redefining infrastructure with Crossplane and the Intelligent Control Plane. We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help scale Upbound Spaces, the central multi-control-plane management software.

You’ll work on production SaaS environments, contribute to open-source projects, and collaborate across cloud and on-prem deployments. You’ll build Go-based code interfacing with Kubernetes, improve observability, and help drive reliability and performance at scale in a fast-growing

Qualifications

• Experience operating production cloud services at scale (monitoring, incident response, post-mortems).
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems with observability tools.
• Experience building/operating controllers that interact with Kubernetes API server.

Responsibilities

• Actively build and operate Upbound Spaces in production and contribute to Open Source projects.
• Take ownership of high-demand features and deliver new functionality for customers.
• Investigate and debug complex issues in customer environments and multi-tenant setups.
• Write design documents and post-incident reviews to drive improvements.
• Support full project lifecycle for scalable services in cloud environments.

Skills

Production cloud services

Distributed systems debugging

Kubernetes API experience

Customer interaction

Ownership mindset

Communication

Tools

Go

Kubernetes

Job description

Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built for the Agentic AI Era. We’re the creators and primary maintainers ofCrossplane, and we’re building theIntelligent Control Plane—a new platform layer that makes infrastructureprogrammable, autonomous, and composable.

Our mission is to power the AI-native enterprise with a foundational platform layer that helps teams provision, operate, and adapt infrastructure at scale—so platforms are ready for both humans and AI agents. We partner with leading cloud providers, ISVs, and open-source communities to help organizations move faster with greater confidence.

Today, Upbound supportsFortune 500 companiesand platform engineers across100+ countries. Crossplane has surpassed100M+ downloadsand is used by1,000+ teams worldwide. We’re aSeries Bcompany backed byGV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, and we’ve raised$69Mto date. Learn more atupbound.io .

Upbound is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to help us build and operate Upbound Spaces, the multi-control-plane management software at the heart of the Upbound Platform.

As part of the Spaces team, you’ll help us scale Upbound to reliably support thousands of control planes while extending enterprise-grade control plane management and operations across both cloud and on-premises environments. Our team is growing, and this is an opportunity to make a meaningful engineering impact across both product development and production operations.

For this particular opening, we’re focused on growing our engineering presence in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle, and are prioritizing candidates who are currently based in, or able to work from, one of those two markets.

What You'll Do

• Actively build and operate Upbound Spaces in production, troubleshooting and resolving issues across multi-tenant SaaS environments, as well as contributing to Upbound's open-source projects, including Crossplane.
• Take ownership of building features in high demand by Upbound's customers and deliver new functionality that will delight and amaze our users.
• Investigate and debug complex issues in customer environments, including multi-control plane scenarios, resource reconciliation problems, and performance bottlenecks.
• Communicate through thoughtful and thorough design documents for new initiatives and detailed post-incident reviews that drive system improvements.
• Support the full project lifecycle for highly scalable and reliable services running in a cloud environment – discovery, analysis, architecture, design, review, documentation, building, migration, automation, deployment, production-readiness, and ongoing operational support.
• Write and maintain Go code that interfaces with the Kubernetes API, such as operators, controllers, add-ons, etc., with a focus on observability, debuggability, and operational excellence.
• Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot our Kubernetes services in production, using metrics, logs, and traces to identify and resolve issues quickly.
• Build and maintain operational tooling for debugging customer environments, analyzing control plane health, and automating incident response.
• Author documentation, user guides, runbooks, and blog posts to support and promote new features that you release.
• Support the software release cycle for Spaces self-hosted distributions, including diagnosing issues in customer-managed deployments.
• Participate in on-call rotation to support Upbound Cloud, responding to incidents and driving them to resolution.

What You'll Bring

• Have experience operating production cloud services at scale: monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-mortems, and continuous improvement of service reliability.
• Have strong debugging skills across distributed systems, including experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing) and techniques for diagnosing issues in production environments.
• Have experience building and operating controllers that interact with the Kubernetes API server, including troubleshooting reconciliation loops, managing API rate limits, and optimizing controller performance.
• Are comfortable working directly with customers to understand, reproduce, and resolve complex technical issues in their environments.
• Take responsibility and ownership for solving problems even if they are outside your lane, especially during incidents affecting customer workloads.
• Demonstrate excellence in your work, constantly trying to improve your skills and the operational posture of the systems you build.
• Have empathy for customers and keep them in mind as you build solutions, understanding that reliability and debuggability are features.
• Realize the importance of clear communication and effective collaboration to work as a team, deliver great results, and support customers through technical challenges.
• Help create a safe environment where everyone can contribute, learn from failures, share on-call knowledge, and help each other grow as operators and engineers.

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 is pioneering infrastructure platforms for the Agentic AI Era, serving Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across more than 100 countries. The company empowers 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 $69M to date. For more information, visitwww.upbound.io .

We’re a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

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