Strategic Account Executive - 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.

Today, Upbound supports 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. Learn more at upbound.io

Upbound is looking for a Strategic Account Executive based in the EMEA region to drive enterprise sales across our rapidly growing cloud infrastructure platform. In this role, you will own the full sales cycle with enterprise customers, partnering closely with solutions engineering, product, and marketing to guide organizations through modernizing their cloud platform architecture using Upbound’s control plane technology.

We’re looking for someone who understands the enterprise infrastructure landscape and enjoys working with platform, DevOps, and cloud engineering teams to solve complex problems. This role must be based in EMEA and reports directly to Upbound’s CRO. Candidates who speak additional regional languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, etc.) are a strong plus as you’ll be engaging customers across multiple markets in the region.

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.
• Fluent in a regional language (Dutch, German, Italian etc.)

 #LI-REMOTE

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.