--- title: 'Sr. Engineering Manager at Upbound' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-engineering-manager-upbound-san-francisco-0pes50jdyn7z' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-03' --- # Sr. Engineering Manager at Upbound - **Company:** Upbound - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-03 - **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/upbound/jobs/6188460004 ## Job description Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built for the Agentic AI Era. We’re the creators and primary maintainers of Crossplane, and we’re building the Intelligent Control Plane—a new platform layer that makes infrastructure programmable, 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 supports Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers across 100+ countries. Crossplane has surpassed 100M+ downloads and is used by 1,000+ teams worldwide. We’re a Series B company backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures), Altimeter Capital, and Intel Capital, and we’ve raised $69M to date. Learn more at [upbound.io](http://upbound.io/) Upbound is building the control plane for the modern enterprise. As the company behind Crossplane, the open-source CNCF project that extends Kubernetes into an AI-native cloud control plane, Upbound enables organizations to compose, manage, and operate infrastructure and services through declarative, programmable control planes. Upbound Cloud delivers hosted, multi-tenant control planes that power platform engineering teams at scale. The Management Plane is how customers experience all of it. It is the unified API surface, the interface they work in, the catalog they discover content through, and the systems that connect, license, and bill everything they run. As we scale into the next phase of growth, we are hiring a Senior Manager to lead this group. Areas of Ownership - Hub — The Upbound Hub API, which indexes and aggregates control planes across an organization and provides unified API access, multi-tenancy, and organization context regardless of where those control planes run. - Console — The primary frontend client and user experience for the entire Upbound platform, spanning single control plane views, multi-control-plane management, and organization-level operations. - Marketplace — The distribution and discovery layer where users and customers find providers, functions, configurations, and extensions. - Middleware — The platform services the business depends on: billing and metering, licensing and entitlements, Connect, and the identity and access plumbing that ties them together. This is a senior leadership role responsible for growing a team, defining the architecture of the Management Plane, and ensuring these four surfaces operate as one coherent product rather than four adjacent ones. In this role, you will … Management Plane Strategy Own the long-term technical direction for Hub, Console, Marketplace, and middleware. Ensure they present a single coherent experience to customers whether their control planes run in Upbound Cloud or in their own environment. Define the architectural direction for the Hub API, multi-tenancy, and organization-level identity and access management. Drive the reliability and performance standards these surfaces are held to. Middleware and Commerce Own the systems that turn product usage into revenue: metering, usage aggregation, billing, licensing, and entitlement enforcement. Ensure these systems are accurate, auditable, and resilient, and that they can support new packaging and pricing without a rewrite each time. Partner with Finance and Revenue on the operational side of billing correctness. AI-Native Access Ensure the Hub API is a first-class interface for autonomous agents as well as human operators, with the declarative, programmatic access agentic workflows require. Evolve the Console toward a multi-modal experience that works alongside those workflows rather than around them. ## Team Leadership Lead senior ICs and tech leads directly. Grow the team deliberately against the roadmap, raise the hiring bar, and develop engineers into senior and lead roles. Establish operational rigor: roadmap planning, delivery predictability, on-call ownership, and production excellence across the Management Plane surfaces. Cross-Functional Partnership Partner closely with Product, Design, GTM, Finance, and Customer Success. Translate enterprise requirements around security, multi-tenancy, packaging, and entitlements into platform capabilities. Represent the Management Plane in conversations about pricing changes, packaging, and customer-facing reliability. You are a good fit if you have… - 7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineers directly - Experience building and operating multi-tenant SaaS products at scale - Strong API design fundamentals, including versioning, backward compatibility, and designing for third-party consumers - Hands-on experience with at least one commerce or platform middleware domain: billing, metering, licensing, entitlements, or identity and access management - Track record of owning production reliability for customer-facing services, including incident response and on-call culture - Has built or intentionally restructured a team, not only inherited one - Technically credible with senior and principal engineers while operating at the roadmap level ## Skills / Traits - Leadership: Sets direction and quality standards for a group of senior engineers who need clarity more than supervision. Earns followership through judgment and technical credibility rather than title. - People Management: Develops engineers deliberately toward their next level, runs consistent 1:1s and feedback loops, and addresses underperformance directly instead of waiting for a review cycle. - Decision-Making: Makes calls with incomplete information on a surface where reversals are expensive. A published API, a data model, or a billing schema is hard to walk back, so the bar for thinking a decision through is higher here than in most teams. - Communication: Translates fluently between engineering, Product, Design, Finance, and GTM. Writes clearly enough that a pricing change or an API deprecation can be understood by everyone it affects without a meeting. - Problem-Solving: Drives to root cause on correctness problems rather than stopping at a mitigation. Comfortable reasoning about a discrepancy that only shows up in one tenant's invoice. - Prioritization: Balances roadmap commitments against revenue-blocking middleware work, reliability debt, and customer escalations, and can explain the tradeoff to the people who lost the argument. - Project Management: Delivers predictably across four tightly coupled surfaces where a Hub API change can block Console and Marketplace at the same time. Manages dependencies and sequencing without adding process for its own sake. - Adaptability: Absorbs shifts in packaging, pricing, and agentic access requirements without rearchitecting each time. Adjusts approach when a framework or plan stops serving the team. - Risk Management: Treats billing accuracy, entitlement enforcement, and API compatibility as areas where mistakes cost real money and customer trust. Builds the guardrails, auditability, and testing to catch problems before customers do. - Technical Proficiency: Credible in API design, multi-tenant data modeling, and identity and access patterns, with enough frontend depth to lead Console work substantively rather than defer on it. It is a plus if you have… - Familiarity with Kubernetes and the cloud-native ecosystem - Frontend or full-stack depth, enough to lead Console work substantively - Experience with marketplaces, developer catalogs, or package distribution systems - Experience with usage-based or hybrid pricing models and the systems behind them - Startup experience in high-growth infrastructure or developer-tools companies - Familiarity with how AI agents consume infrastructure APIs ## #LI-REMOTE 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, visit [www.upbound.io](http://www.upbound.io/). ## About Upbound ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Upbound provides an intelligent control plane platform based on Kubernetes and Crossplane that enables organizations to build, operate, and scale infrastructure at the speed of AI. - **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage and financial details not publicly disclosed in available sources) - **Headquarters**: Not publicly specified in provided sources; the company operates as a remote-first organization with a globally distributed team - **Founded**: Year not explicitly stated in available sources (the company was founded by the creators of Crossplane, an open-source project that began in 2018, but Upbound’s founding year is not confirmed from provided data) - **Founders**: Bassam Tabbara (Founder & CEO) – also co-creator of Crossplane and other CNCF projects like Rook ## Core Business - **Primary industries**: Cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes-native platforms, AI infrastructure, open-source software - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise, SMB; specifically infrastructure and platform engineering teams. Trusted by over 1,000 teams worldwide [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) - **Mission statement**: “We enable organizations to build infrastructure platforms at the speed of AI, safely and with trust.” [upbound.io/about-us](https://www.upbound.io/about-us) ## Products & Services - **[Upbound Crossplane 2.0](https://www.upbound.io/)**: The core product – an intelligent control plane for AI-native infrastructure. It provides declarative, Kubernetes-native management of infrastructure across any cloud, with built-in cost optimization, policy enforcement, and security. Available as a SaaS platform and as an upgrade from open-source Crossplane with zero configuration rewrites. - **Subscriptions**: Offerings for both individual community members and large enterprises, including enterprise-grade support, security, and compliance features. ## Market Standing - **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: 100 million+ downloads of the platform; 1,000+ teams using the product; 100,000+ contributions from the open-source community [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not listed in provided sources. However, the underlying Crossplane project is a CNCF-graduated project, and Upbound is an active contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [upbound.io/about-us](https://www.upbound.io/about-us) - **Growth Signals**: - 98% reduction in DevOps engineering costs reported by a customer [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) - 99.98% faster deployments (months to minutes) [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) - Upbound control planes handle 100x more resources [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) - Portugal’s largest private-sector bank saved 15,500+ developer hours annually using Crossplane and Upbound [upbound.io](https://www.upbound.io/) ## Competitive Advantages - **Founded by the creators of Crossplane**: Deep expertise in the Kubernetes-native control plane paradigm that powers the platform. - **CNCF Graduation**: Crossplane is a graduated CNCF project, giving it broad community trust and ecosystem support. - **Declarative, AI-native infrastructure**: The platform is purpose-built for both human operators and AI agents, enabling instant provisioning, scaling, and self-healing. - **Enterprise-grade security and compliance**: Built-in encryption, policy enforcement, and cost controls. - **Seamless upgrade from OSS**: Users can upgrade from open-source Crossplane without rewriting configurations, lowering migration friction. ## Strategic Focus - **AI-native operations**: Continually evolving the platform to support autonomous infrastructure management, self-healing, and adaptive scaling as AI capabilities advance. - **Intelligent cost optimization**: Real-time scaling, resource rightsizing, and automated cost controls to prevent waste. - **Enterprise expansion**: Serving a growing number of large enterprises and financial institutions, with a focus on predictable pricing and transparent cost management. - **Open-source community leadership**: Maintaining active contribution to Crossplane and the CNCF ecosystem. ## Why Work Here - **Remote-first culture**: The company is globally distributed and offers flexible working arrangements, including work-from-anywhere policy [upbound.io/careers](https://www.upbound.io/careers) - **Benefits**: - Competitive healthcare (US-based plans cover 100% of premiums for the employee) - Stock option equity grants for meaningful ownership - 401(k) plan for US teammates - Home office stipend - Flexible PTO and paid holidays [upbound.io/careers](https://www.upbound.io/careers) - **Core values**: Be Accountable, Collaborate Decisively, Demonstrate Craftsmanship, Care For Our Communities, Champion The Customer, Act as an Owner, Engage Vulnerability [upbound.io/careers](https://www.upbound.io/careers) - **Engineering culture**: Deeply rooted in open source and cloud-native principles. The team includes veterans from Airbnb, Uber, Twilio, AWS, and MuleSoft. Engineers work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of Kubernetes, AI, and infrastructure. - **Open roles (as of profile date)**: Customer Success, Support, Solutions Architecture, Software Engineering (Senior and Director), Sales (Mid-Market and Strategic Account Executives) – all remote within North America or EMEA [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/upbound) ## Sources 1. [upbound.io/about-us](https://www.upbound.io/about-us) 2. [upbound.io/](https://www.upbound.io/) 3. [upbound.io/careers](https://www.upbound.io/careers) 4. [upbound.io/resources/upbound-overview](https://www.upbound.io/resources/upbound-overview) 5. [greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/upbound) ## Other roles at Upbound - [Senior Product Marketing Manager [REMOTE]](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-marketing-manager-remote-upbound-north-s3ynt4kxap7k) — North, United States - [Head of Growth Marketing [REMOTE]](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-growth-marketing-remote-upbound-north-bkd37en98s2n) — North, United States - [Strategic Account Executive - N.A. [REMOTE]](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-account-executive-n-a-remote-upbound-north-etfvaj2wefhm) — North, United States - [Senior Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-upbound-san-francisco-gk4n1xjth6d2) — San Francisco, CA - [Sr. Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-engineering-manager-additive-ai-san-francisco-mzarrentmxxc) — San Francisco, CA - [Sr. Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-engineering-manager-upbound-job-posting-san-francisco-077xknhnpwse) — San Francisco, CA - [Sr. Engineering Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/sr-engineering-manager-upbound-job-posting-seattle-mwvmd376s14k) — Seattle, WA