Staff Solutions Architect [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.

As a Staff Solutions Engineer (SE) at Upbound, you'll be a vital part of our pre-sales team. This role will support all pre-sales efforts in North America across multiple segments. Once a lead is discovered and qualified, the Solutions Engineer works directly with the customer to understand the technical business problem they are trying to solve. They will help customers navigate and understand the value Upbound products and solutions bring them. Solutions Engineers build credible technical relationships with our customers by listening and then clearly communicating the value proposition of our products in a way that is contextualized to the customer’s specific needs.

Solutions Engineers are deeply familiar with Upbound’s product roadmap and will intuit when to sell ahead of our product roadmap and when to focus on existing solutions based on the customer’s medium and long term vision. Solutions Engineers are expected to deeply understand the key technical and economic buyer's personalities and what it will take to get them to sign a deal.

In this role, you will: 

• Partnering with a Sales Account Executive to engage in technical discussions with customers throughout the buying lifecycle.
• Working cross functionally with product marketing, and independently, to create and deliver high fidelity presentations, custom demos, sample solutions, and present use cases to guide the customer through the buying journey
• Closely partnering with customers and platform builders to solve technical and business challenges which enables them to design, build and implement Crossplane and Upbound Cloud based control plane architectures.
• Working directly with customers and platform builders to define, implement, and test out early proof of concepts of Crossplane and Upbound Cloud.
• Collect detailed customer requirements so product and engineering can accurately estimate and resource the necessary implementation services.
• The technical voice and trusted advisor to the customer and represent the customer needs internally.
• Project manage the account pre and post sale to ensure a smooth and frictionless customer experience through implementation in partnership with Solutions Architect and implementation teams. 

You are a good fit if you have: 

• Worked in pre-sales, consulting, or equivalent experience in an enterprise environment.
• Experience developing relationships with engineering, executive, and commercial teams throughout large organizations.
• Guided customers through designing and deploying Kubernetes to their production environments.
• A deep understanding of highly scaled and reliable services, solutions, and infrastructure in multiple major cloud providers.
• Worked directly with customers and/or open source community members to troubleshoot and solve their complex technical issues preventing successful adoption.
• Deployed and integrated the projects and tools of the Cloud Native Landscape, especially CNCF projects, into production environments.
• A deep understanding of modern operational and application delivery tools and methodologies inside of production deployment workflows, like those from HashiCorp (e.g. Terraform), CI/CD, IaC, and GitOps.
• The ability to work closely with people in a wide variety of disciplines from a wide variety of backgrounds.
• Successfully managed multiple projects and priorities in a fast paced and dynamic environment.
• Successfully identified and removed friction from the buying process resulting in a more streamlined and shortened sales cycle.
• Excitement and comfort being a key part of further defining, scaling, and making this part of our sales process thrive.

It is a plus if: 

• You are actively involved or have contributed to the upstream Kubernetes community.
• You have a history of speaking at technology conferences, blogging/writing technical articles, and/or contributing to a popular open source project.
• You have worked in a startup and distributed/remote team before, and understand the unique challenges of a startup environment.

#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.