Senior Engineering Manager

Join Upbound, the company behind Crossplane, as a Senior Engineering Manager. In this senior leadership role, you will lead the Management Plane team, define the architecture, and ensure a cohesive product experience. You will own the long-term technical direction for Hub, Console, Marketplace, and middleware, and drive the systems that turn product usage into revenue. You will also lead senior ICs and tech leads, establish operational rigor, and partner closely with various teams. This is a remote-first position with flexible hours and a range of benefits.

• Definir la arquitectura del plano de gestión y garantizar que las diferentes superficies operen como un producto coherente.
• Ser responsable de la dirección técnica a largo plazo para el Hub, la Consola, el Mercado y el middleware, asegurando que presenten una experiencia única al cliente.
• Dirigir y desarrollar un equipo de ingenieros, estableciendo rigor operativo en la planificación de la hoja de ruta, la previsibilidad de la entrega y la excelencia en la producción.

• 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
• Experience building and operating multi-tenant SaaS products at scale
• 7+ years of engineering experience, including 3+ years managing engineers directly
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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