As a Principal Software Engineer at Upbound, you’ll be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining critical backend systems of the core Upbound product. 

Upbound's cloud-native platform is the user-facing experience that Upbound is creating on Crossplane. By leveraging Upbound’s control plane technology, platform operators can offload complex administration of their Crossplane clusters and spend more time building multi-cloud APIs tailored for their engineering organization to claim and own critical pieces of infrastructure for their work. 

The Upbound Marketplace is the distribution hub for the Crossplane community to discover, install, and publish their preferred packages for consumption. Whether they are Providers that capture new kinds of APIs for Crossplane to learn, or Configurations and Functions that allow you to deploy a customizable reference architecture in minutes, the Marketplace is a central hub of activity that will support Crossplane’s growing open-source community.

You will be exposed to industry standard specifications like OCI and build efficient architectures and APIs for querying control planes that may have thousands of CRDs installed across the globe. This is just a sample of the healthy set of challenging engineering problems that will complete Upbound as a definitive cloud-native platform.

Even if you don’t meet 100% of these requirements, but are excited about what Upbound is doing, we would love to have you bring your experience with production quality systems to help us build an impactful product on Crossplane.

In this role, you will be…

• Assuming technical ownership of the Upbound API workstream. This includes core APIs and services for our registry, console, central authn/authz, the up CLI, and our Go SDK.
• Contributing to architecture and design proposals for complex problems such as efficient querying of data across multiple Kubernetes clusters.
• Partnering with Product Management and our Crossplane engineering squad to ensure a predictable flow of upstream Crossplane features into the core Upbound product
• Proactively tracking, triaging, and resolving issues with internal teams as well as OSS community members
• Mentoring more junior members of the team and providing in-depth, constructive feedback on pull requests and design documents

You are a good fit if you have...

• Built many APIs or abstractions of lower-level protocols with Go (and love it!)
• Built and maintained production systems such as pub-subs, search engines (Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL preferred), or OCI registries
• Experience with modern protocols and frameworks like HTTP/2, gRPC, and standard authn/authz flows like OAuth.
• Familiarity with the Kubernetes Resource Model and the resource API
• Utilized modern rollout strategies with Kubernetes and understand how to monitor and debug them
• Written applications to store and retrieve data at scale (high-throughput, low latency) for data streaming systems
• Built products utilizing public cloud infrastructure and services: AWS, Azure, and/or GCP

It is a plus if you…

• Have experience with Crossplane, particularly with using Composition
• Worked in a startup and distributed/remote team before, and understood the unique challenges of a startup environment.
• Are actively involved with or have contributed to the open-source projects in the CNCF