About this role.
Upbound is hiring a Strategic Enterprise Account Executive to build, manage, and close complex enterprise opportunities for its cloud infrastructure and AI platform offerings. The role owns strategic customer relationships across the sales cycle, from prospecting and qualification through adoption and post-sales coordination. Success requires enterprise solution-selling experience, strong MEDDICC discipline, and credibility with senior IT and business leaders at global organizations. The Account Executive will work closely with demand generation, solutions engineering, product, sales development, and customer success teams. The role is remote for the North America region and includes travel to customer sites and industry events as needed.
Role DNA
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5/5Communication Load
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Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I identify and validate metrics, the economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, pain, champion, and competition early. I document each area in the CRM, assign actions to close gaps, and avoid forecasting opportunities until critical buying elements are evidence-based.
I begin by understanding the organization’s infrastructure operating model, cloud complexity, developer experience goals, and governance requirements. I then align technical capabilities to measurable outcomes such as faster provisioning, reduced operational toil, stronger policy control, and improved platform-team productivity, using technical partners to validate the solution.
I build a stakeholder map, develop value hypotheses relevant to each executive’s priorities, and earn internal introductions through practitioners, champions, and existing relationships. Each executive interaction is concise, outcome-oriented, and supported by a clear point of view on the cost of maintaining the status quo.
I revisit the documented decision process and confirm whether the business pain, champion strength, economic buyer access, and next steps remain intact. I create a mutual action plan with dated commitments, surface unresolved risks directly, and re-engage executive sponsors when necessary.
I segment accounts by potential, urgency, installed footprint, and likelihood of expansion, then reserve protected time for proactive prospecting. Within active customers, I work with customer success and technical teams to identify adoption milestones and adjacent use cases that create credible expansion paths.
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
The Strategic Enterprise Account Executive role is an outside sales position responsible for developing, managing, and closing business for Strategic Enterprise customers in the North America region 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.
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.
- 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.
It’s a plus if you:
- 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
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.
Annual salary information is not provided for this position. Explore salary ranges for similar roles in our Salary Directory ›
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