Strategic Account Executive

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.

The Account Executive, Strategic Account role is an outside sales position responsible for developing, managing, and closing business for enterprise customers and is an integral part of the field sales organization. This person will partner with our demand generation, solutions engineering, and product teams to guide prospective customers through a solutions sales journey of modernizing their cloud platform architecture. This position will require you to develop a deep understanding of the specific challenges customers are facing to help them positively achieve their business outcomes with Upbound’s solutions. 

This position reports directly to Upbound’s CRO, but you will work cross-functionally with product, marketing, sales development and customer success to provide a tight-knit customer relationship, account leadership and direction in both the pre-sales and post-sales processes.

In this role, you will:

• Carry a sales quota that aligns with Upbound’s revenue goals.
• Function as the primary point of contact and the face of Upbound for new prospects and customers.
• Conduct sales activities including prospecting and developing opportunities within existing customer accounts.
• Manage complex mid enterprise sales campaigns with multiple prospect engagement points.
• Ensure the successful rollout and adoption of Upbound products and services in partnership with pre-and-post sales engineering and support.
• Generate qualified leads and develop new customers in partnership with strategic channel and alliance partners.
• Take ownership of your business by documenting the buying criteria, process, and owners to ensure pipeline accuracy.
• Look for and implement improvements to sales processes, tools, and materials.
• Travel to customer sites and industry conferences and events as needed.

You are a good fit if you have:

• Proven track record of consistently meeting or exceeding assigned annual/quarterly goals and targets and consistently ranked top 1-2 on your team.
• Experience in solution and value selling in the enterprise cloud or cloud-native product spaces, especially if you’ve contained a meaningful open source component.
• Correctly estimate qualifying opportunities based on BANT.
• A genuine passion and enjoyment in bringing new products to market.
• Drive to build a business, hunger to find and close deals, and pride in the growth of the business.
• Relentless focus on customer success and meeting the needs of present and future customers.
• Experience building positive professional relationships with developers and executives.
• Clear and articulate written, verbal, online, and in-person communication skills.
• Professionalism, attention to detail, and strong follow-up.
• A collaborative mindset and willingness to help solve problems outside of your immediate lane.
• Fun in your job and enjoy what you do.

It’s a plus if you: 

• Strong understanding of legacy Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Chef).
• Significant experience selling disruptive technology into focused markets.

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.