Sr Engineering Manager, AI-Native Control Planes (Remote)

Upbound - Job Posting; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Upbound is hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem Group. You will own strategy and execution for customer-facing control planes, and oversee multiple managers and teams, aligning product and enterprise needs with a scalable ecosystem.

You will drive reliability, architecture, and field collaboration at scale. You will partner across Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to translate enterprise needs into actionable platform capabilities and foster an

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, including 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 architecture strategy for hosted control planes and ecosystem extensibility.
• Lead multiple engineering teams and managers to scale product velocity.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and production excellence across platforms.
• Partner with Product, GTM, Alliances, and CS to align strategy with revenue goals.
• Represent engineering in executive-level conversations around ecosystem expansion.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Cloud-native

Kubernetes

SaaS control planes

APIs

SDKs

Extensibility frameworks

Ecosystem products

Production reliability

Strategic & technical balance

Job description

Upbound is hiring a Sr. Engineering Manager to lead the Control Planes & Ecosystem Group. You will own strategy and execution for customer-facing control planes, and oversee multiple managers and teams, aligning product and enterprise needs with a scalable ecosystem.

You will drive reliability, architecture, and field collaboration at scale. You will partner across Product, GTM, Alliances, and Customer Success to translate enterprise needs into actionable platform capabilities and foster an