Data Engineer – AI (REMOTE)

About Upbound

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.

Job Summary

We’re seeking an exceptional Principal Data Engineer to serve as the technical leader for data infrastructure supporting Upbound’s current product suite in addition to our AI initiatives and intelligent control plane capabilities. In this role, you’ll architect and drive the development of sophisticated data platforms that power AI-driven features.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision for data platforms that support AI-powered features in Crossplane and Upbound Spaces
• Lead the design of data pipelines that transform infrastructure and data into training datasets for ML models
• Architect vector search and RAG systems that leverage Crossplane Control Planes & Upbound Marketplace as a knowledge store
• Build data infrastructure that processes resources, extensions, and compositions for semantic search
• Establish frameworks for collecting, processing, and analyzing infrastructure configuration data
• Design data pipelines that handle Crossplane-specific data
• Create infrastructure for indexing and searching Upbound Marketplace content, documentation, and community patterns
• Develop metrics and monitoring for AI features integrated with Upbound’s control plane architecture

Product Development & Strategy

• Design data systems that power AI agents for infrastructure provisioning & operations, helping users generate and optimize Crossplane compositions
• Create feature engineering platforms that extract signals from control plane operations, resource status, and reconciliation patterns
• Implement data infrastructure for training models that predict infrastructure failures, optimize resource allocation, and suggest configuration improvements
• Drive the development of knowledge graph representations of infrastructure dependencies and relationships

Requirements

• 10+ years of software/data engineering experience with at least 4 years in technical leadership roles
• Proven track record building data platforms that support production systems at scale
• Deep expertise in both traditional data engineering (Spark, Airflow, data lakes) and ML-specific infrastructure