Senior Principal Software Engineer (REMOTE)

About this role

Job DescriptionJob DescriptionUpbound is the company behind Crossplane, the open source project which started the control plane revolution in the cloud native community. Upbound is redefining how modern infrastructure is built. As the creators of Crossplane and the pioneers of the Intelligent Control Plane, we are leading the shift toward agentic infrastructure : platforms that reason, adapt, and operate alongside AI-native systems.We're seeking an exceptional Senior Principal Engineer to serve as the technical leader to develop the future of autonomous infrastructure platforms for the enterprise. In this role, you'll architect and drive the development of a sophisticated multi-control plane system powered by AI that unifies infrastructure management, workload orchestration, and policy governance at scale. We call this the Control Fabric. Building on the innovations Upbound has pioneered with Crossplane, Spaces, and the AI-Native Intelligent Control Plane, you'll design solutions that enable enterprise organizations to deploy and manage infrastructure platforms at massive scale. This is an opportunity to work at the forefront of cloud-native infrastructure, solving complex challenges for the world's most demanding environments. What You'll Do Technical Leadership & Architecture\* Define and drive the technical vision for our multi-control plane architecture, leveraging Crossplane's control plane framework and extending Upbound Spaces concepts to solve enterprise-scale infrastructure challenges\* Lead the design and implementation of control plane abstractions that elegantly separate concerns across infrastructure provisioning, workload lifecycle management, and policy enforcement\* Architect solutions for enterprise organizations managing thousands of workloads across multi-cloud, on premises, and hybrid environments, balancing complexity with usability\* Establish technical standards and decision-making frameworks that guide the organization through complex archite...