Customer Success Account Manager [REMOTE] at Upbound

Job Application for Customer Success Account Manager [REMOTE] at Upbound

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

About the Role

Upbound is hiring a Customer Success Account Manager to own the post-sale relationship for our Commercial segment. This is a high-energy, relationship-first role for someone who is as motivated to protect and grow revenue as they are to genuinely help customers succeed with Crossplane-powered infrastructure. You are not a passive check-in person. You are a proactive, commercially-minded relationship builder who maps stakeholders before they become risks, gets curious about how Upbound's platform can create more value, and treats every renewal as something that was won not assumed. You bring SDR-level hunger, CS-level empathy, and enough technical curiosity to have real conversations with engineering teams. You will own the customer lifecycle from kickoff through renewal and expansion working alongside Solution Architects, Customer Support and Solution Engineers to ensure Upbound accounts fully adopt the Upbound platform and see clear, measurable value from their investment.

Responsibilities

• Renewal Ownership & Commercial Focus
• Own GRR as your primary metric — you are accountable for making sure every Commercial account renews, and you treat any risk to renewal as something to resolve weeks or months before the conversation, not at the last minute
• Proactively identify expansion opportunities — platform consolidation, additional use cases, services upsell, multi-year conversion — and bring them to the AE with a clear business case
• Build and maintain accurate renewal forecasts, risk flags, and health signals across your portfolio, ensuring the business always has a clear view of Commercial ARR
• Drive referencibility and case study development — know which customers are thriving and actively create the conditions for them to become advocates
• Relationship Building & Stakeholder Management
• Map every account: know who the economic buyer is, who the technical champion is, who the skeptic is, and who you haven't met yet — and keep that list current
• Build genuine, trusted relationships across your accounts — not just the ones who respond to your emails, but the VP of Platform Engineering who hasn't been introduced yet
• Lead regular customer touchpoints, QBRs, and business reviews that connect Upbound's technical progress to outcomes the business actually cares about
• Act as the customer's advocate inside Upbound — surfacing risk, escalating support issues, and ensuring product and engineering understand what Commercial customers need
• Technical Curiosity & Platform Adoption
• Stay genuinely curious about Crossplane, Kubernetes, and the infrastructure platform space — you don't need to write manifesto’s, but you need to understand why a platform engineer cares and speak that language in a customer conversation
• Partner with SAs to understand implementation status, adoption blockers, and technical health — and translate that into commercial risk or opportunity
• Champion Upbound's product vision with your customers — connecting the roadmap to their use cases and building the stickiness that makes Upbound a need to have
• Identify customers who are underutilizing the platform and build action plans with the SA to accelerate adoption before it becomes a renewal risk

Requirements

• 3–6 years of experience in Customer Success, Account Management, or a closely related commercial role ideally in B2B SaaS or infrastructure software
• Proven track record owning renewals and expansion you have hit GRR/NRR targets and you know how to forecast accurately and recover at-risk accounts
• Relentlessly relationship-driven you are energized by building new connections, not just maintaining existing ones
• Commercially aggressive in the best sense always looking for expansion opportunities and bringing them with evidence, not instinct
• Genuine technical curiosity you learn new technologies quickly and are interested in what your customers are building
• Strong communicator you can run a QBR with a VP, de-escalate a frustrated engineer, and write a crisp renewal business case in the same week
• Some SDR or outbound experience you know how to open doors, follow up relentlessly, and create pipeline where others don't see it

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.