As a Staff Solutions Architect at Upbound, you own the technical success of our customers in our. You are the primary driver of customer outcomes, from initial implementation through production adoption, ensuring customers achieve real business value with Crossplane and the Upbound platform. This is a deeply technical, hands-on role embedded in the post-sales motion, working closely with customers to deliver working solutions, not just guidance.

In this role, you will Own:

Customer Technical Outcomes

• Drive end-to-end technical success for a portfolio of enterprise customers, from post-sales handoff through production adoption.
• Own the implementation of known Upbound use cases — control plane architectures, Upbound/Crossplane configurations, GitOps integration, platform engineering patterns — and ensure customers reach their target state.
• Define and track technical milestones that map to customer business objectives and contract value.
• Act as the primary technical escalation point when customers face blockers, coordinating engineering and product resources to resolve them.

Implementation & Architecture

• Lead technical discovery to deeply understand customer environments, platform requirements, and target architecture.
• Design and deliver Crossplane-based control plane architectures tailored to customer infrastructure and organizational context.
• Build and maintain reference platforms and implementation accelerators that codify Upbound best practices and reduce time-to-value for common use cases.
• Contribute Statements of Work that accurately scope implementation engagements.
• Write code, fix bugs, and build scoped features within Upbound products, provider ecosystem, and Crossplane core where needed to unblock customers.

Technical Voice of the Customer

• Represent customer technical needs internally to influence product roadmap and prioritization.
• Partner with pre-sales SEs to ensure smooth, informed handoffs with full context on customer environment and expectations.
• Identify expansion opportunities as customer technical maturity grows and new Upbound capabilities become relevant.

You are a good fit if you have:

• Hands-on Kubernetes expertise — operators, controllers, or add-ons; production deployment and management experience.
• Platform engineering or SRE background, with direct experience building or operating an Internal Developer Platform (IDP).
• Deep familiarity with cloud-native tooling: CNCF ecosystem, IaC (Terraform/Pulumi), GitOps (Flux/ArgoCD), CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience across at least two major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) at production scale.
• Strong programming skills; Go is strongly preferred.
• Proven track record of leading customers through complex technical implementations to successful, measurable outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills — comfortable presenting architecture and trade-offs to both engineering teams and executive stakeholders.
• Able to manage multiple customer engagements simultaneously in a fast-moving startup environment.

It is a plus if:

• Crossplane power user — contributions to core or the provider ecosystem are very appreciated [for many reasons]
• Active Kubernetes community involvement: contributions, conference talks, technical writing, or open source maintainership.
• CKA or CKAD certification.
• Prior startup, familiarity with coding agents and distributed team experience.

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