Sr. Engineering Manager

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

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