Upbound 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.
The Account Executive - Strategic Enterprise role is an outside sales position responsible for developing, managing, and closing business for Strategic 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 role 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 strategic enterprise sales motions 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.
- 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.
- Proven track record of consistently meeting or exceeding assigned annual/quarterly goals and targets and consistently ranked top 1-2 on your team.
- Sold to large enterprise G2K companies and adept at navigating global, multi-national organizations.
- Sold AI, Cloud, or Infrastructure platform oriented products.
- Experience in solution and value selling in the enterprise cloud, cloud-native, and AI product spaces
- Correctly estimate qualifying opportunities based on MEDDICC.
- 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 senior IT and business executives.
- Clear and articulate written, verbal, online, and in-person communication skills.
- Professionalism, polish, 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.
- Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure, AI solutions, and/or Infrastructure as Code tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Chef).
- Significant experience selling disruptive technology into focused markets.
#LI-REMOTE
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.
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