Sr. Engineering Manager

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 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 te