Staff Technical Program Manager
TLDR
Help define the Technical Program Management operating model while leading engagements for Fortune 2000 enterprise accounts deploying complex infrastructure solutions.
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 seeking a Staff Technical Program Manager to join our Customer Experience organization. This is a senior individual contributor role serving our Strategic segment — Upbound's most complex, highest-value enterprise accounts, including Fortune 2000 companies deploying Crossplane-powered infrastructure control planes at scale.
This is not a project coordinator position. We are looking for a deeply experienced program leader who has navigated large enterprise organizations, earned the trust of VP- and C-suite stakeholders, and obsesses over the operational details that determine whether a complex technical program succeeds or stalls. You bring a builder's mindset — actively using AI tooling to automate program workflows, scale your impact across accounts, and help define what a world-class post-sales TPM function looks like.
In this role, you will:
Enterprise Program Leadership
- Own the end-to-end post-sale engagement + account planning program for a portfolio of Fortune 2000 strategic accounts: From implementation kickoff through adoption, value realization, and renewal readiness
- Design and maintain rigorous program governance: project plans, RAID logs, milestone tracking, and executive status reporting tailored to complex enterprise environments
- Proactively surface risks, drive escalation paths, and resolve blockers before they become program-threatening — keeping meticulous documentation that Fortune 2000 stakeholders expect
Executive Stakeholder Management
- Serve as the senior post-sale point of contact for VP- and C-suite stakeholders, including VP Engineering, CTO, and VP Platform Engineering personas at large enterprise accounts
- Lead Executive Business Reviews, onsite COE initiatives, and program health check-ins. Translate infrastructure progress into business outcomes, risk posture, and ROI narratives
- Navigate the organizational complexity of large enterprises: competing priorities, multiple business units, and shifting stakeholder maps — while keeping programs on track
- Partner with Account Executives on renewal and expansion motions, providing executive relationship insights and program health signals to support commercial strategy
Technical Collaboration & AI-Powered Operations
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- Excited about actively leveraging AI tools to scale your impact: automating status reports, generating meeting summaries, building reusable program templates, and surfacing account health signals
- Engage credibly with deeply technical audiences: platform engineers, SREs, and architects empowered to translate technical program status into clear executive and business narratives
- Help define the TPM operating model at Upbound! As an early hire, you will have significant influence over the processes, playbooks, and tooling that future TPMs inherit
You are a good fit if you have:
- 10+ years in Technical Program Management or post-sales technical delivery, with meaningful experience supporting Fortune 2000 or equivalent enterprise customers
- Demonstrated track record managing large-scale, complex technical programs in infrastructure, cloud, or developer tooling environments
- Executive-level communication skills — you write with precision, present with confidence, and earn trust with senior technical and business leaders quickly
- Extreme attention to detail: you catch what others miss, your documentation is always current, and you hold yourself and others to a high standard of rigor
- Technical fluency sufficient to engage credibly with platform engineers and architects on cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and DevOps workflows
- Active user of AI tooling — you are already using LLMs and automation to make yourself more effective, and you want to push this further
- Comfortable operating in ambiguity as an early member of a function being built from scratch
It is a plus if:
- Familiarity with Crossplane, Kubernetes, or cloud-native infrastructure platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience at an infrastructure software company or developer tools startup serving enterprise customers
- PMP, PgMP, or equivalent program management certification
- Experience implementing and/or using project and account management software
#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.
Upbound builds a universal cloud platform that delivers Managed Control Planes leveraging Kubernetes and Crossplane, specifically designed for infrastructure and platform teams. Targeting Fortune 500 companies and platform engineers globally, Upbound stands out as the creator of Crossplane, the leading open-source framework for cloud-native control planes, which has garnered over 100 million downloads and widespread adoption.