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Staff Engagement Manager

North America - Remote

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 hiring a Staff Engagement Manager to join our Customer Experience organization. This senior individual contributor role owns the post-sale success of our largest and most complex enterprise customers: organizations deploying Crossplane-powered infrastructure control planes at scale.

This is not a project coordinator role. You are the person who makes sure a major enterprise customer goes from signed contract to live, adopted, and delivering measurable business value. You work at the center of the customer relationship, connecting the technical teams who build with the commercial teams who own the partnership, and you own the structure, momentum, and executive trust that determine whether a complex program succeeds.

You bring a builder's mindset and actively use AI tooling to scale your impact, and you'll help define what world-class Engagement Management looks like at Upbound.

In this role, you will: 

Drive customers to value, fast

  • Own the post-sale journey end-to-end, from kickoff through implementation, adoption, and ongoing growth
  • Lead implementation with rigor: clear plans, tracked milestones, surfaced risks, and crisp executive communication, so customers reach a working production environment quickly
  • Remove blockers before they threaten the program, and keep the documentation and momentum that large enterprises expect

Turn technical success into business outcomes

  • Guide customers through the critical transition from "the platform is implemented" to "the platform is driving business results," helping them adopt deeply and align technical capability to their business goals
  • Build and tell the business-value narrative that connects infrastructure progress to executive priorities and ROI
  • Run governance cadences and health reviews that keep adoption on track and expanding

Earn executive trust

  • Serve as the senior post-sale point of contact for VP- and C-suite stakeholders such as the CTO, VP Engineering, and VP Platform Engineering
  • Lead Executive Business Reviews and onsite initiatives, and navigate the organizational complexity of large enterprises, including competing priorities, multiple business units, and shifting stakeholders, while keeping programs on track
  • Partner with sales on renewal and growth, contributing the program health, relationship insight, and value documentation that strengthen the long-term partnership

Build the function

  • Leverage AI tools to automate workflows, scale across accounts, and raise the bar on what one EM can deliver
  • Help define the EM operating model: the processes, playbooks, and tooling future Engagement Managers will inherit

You are a good fit if you have: 

  • 10+ years in engagement management, technical program management, or post-sales technical delivery, supporting large enterprise (Fortune 2000 or equivalent) customers
  • Track record managing large-scale, complex technical programs in infrastructure, cloud, or developer-tooling environments
  • Executive-level communication. You write with precision, present with confidence, and quickly earn the trust of senior technical and business leaders
  • Exceptional attention to detail, with documentation that stays current and a consistently high standard of rigor
  • Technical fluency to engage credibly with platform engineers and architects on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and DevOps workflows
  • Active user of AI tooling to make yourself more effective, and eager to push it further
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguity as an early member of a function being built from the ground up

It is a plus if: 

  • Familiarity with Crossplane, Kubernetes, or cloud-native platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
  • Experience at an infrastructure software or developer-tools company serving enterprise customers
  • PMP, PgMP, or equivalent program management certification

#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.

 

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