Responsibilities
- Own: Customer Technical Outcomes
- Drive end-to-end technical success for a portfolio of enterprise customers, from post-sales handoff through production adoption.
- Own the implementation of known Upbound use cases — control plane architectures, Upbound/Crossplane configurations, GitOps integration, platform engineering patterns — and ensure customers reach their target state.
- Define and track technical milestones that map to customer business objectives and contract value.
- Act as the primary technical escalation point when customers face blockers, coordinating engineering and product resources to resolve them.
- Implementation & Architecture
- Lead technical discovery to deeply understand customer environments, platform requirements, and target architecture.
- Design and deliver Crossplane-based control plane architectures tailored to customer infrastructure and organizational context.
- Build and maintain reference platforms and implementation accelerators that codify Upbound best practices and reduce time-to-value for common use cases.
- Contribute Statements of Work that accurately scope implementation engagements.
- Write code, fix bugs, and build scoped features within Upbound products, provider ecosystem, and Crossplane core where needed to unblock customers.
- Technical Voice of the Customer
- Represent customer technical needs internally to influence product roadmap and prioritization.
- Partner with pre-sales SEs to ensure smooth, informed handoffs with full context on customer environment and expectations.
- Identify expansion opportunities as customer technical maturity grows and new Upbound capabilities become relevant.
Requirements
- Hands-on Kubernetes expertise — operators, controllers, or add-ons; production deployment and management experience.
- Platform engineering or SRE background, with direct experience building or operating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
- Deep familiarity with cloud-native tooling: CNCF ecosystem, IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), GitOps (Flux/ArgoCD), CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience across at least two major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) at production scale.
- Strong programming skills; Go is strongly preferred.
- Proven track record of leading customers through complex technical implementations to successful, measurable outcomes.
- Excellent communication skills — comfortable presenting architecture and trade-offs to both engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
- Able to manage multiple customer engagements simultaneously in a fast-moving startup environment.
Nice to Have
- Crossplane power user — contributions to core or the provider ecosystem are very appreciated [for many reasons]
- Active Kubernetes community involvement: contributions, conference talks, technical writing, or open source maintainership.
- CKA or CKAD certification.
- Prior startup, familiarity with coding agents and distributed team experience.
Additional Information
- Remote
