Staff Solutions Engineer EMEA [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. We support 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.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with a Sales Account Executive to engage in technical discussions with customers throughout the buying lifecycle.
• Work cross‑functionally with product marketing and independently to create and deliver high‑fidelity presentations, custom demos, sample solutions, and use cases to guide the customer through the buying journey.
• Closely partner with customers and platform builders to solve technical and business challenges, enabling them to design, build, and implement Crossplane and Upbound Cloud‑based control‑plane architectures.
• Work directly with customers and platform builders to define, implement, and test 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.
• Serve as the technical voice and trusted advisor to the customer, representing the customer’s 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 across multiple major cloud providers.
• Worked directly with customers and/or open‑source community members to troubleshoot and solve complex technical issues preventing successful adoption.
• Deployed and integrated Cloud Native Landscape projects and tools, especially CNCF projects, into production environments.
• A deep understanding of modern operational and application delivery tools and methodologies inside production deployment workflows, such as HashiCorp (e.g., Terraform), CI/CD, IaC, and GitOps.
• Ability to work closely with people in a wide variety of disciplines from diverse 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 enhancing this part of our sales process.

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 or distributed/remote team before, and understand the unique challenges of a startup environment.

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.

As set forth in Upbound’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.