Post by Daniel Rose

My first job in 'infrastructure' was making pizza dough at 6am. These photos are 30 years old. The apron was real. The flour was real. The Friday night rush was very, very real. I learned to prep, scale, deliver, and recover — all before most people had their coffee. When you're boxing up 200 pies on a Friday night, you understand what 'uptime' really means. Fast forward three decades: I'm a CX leader at Upbound, the company behind Crossplane — the open source project redefining how enterprises build and manage cloud infrastructure at scale. The through-line? Operations that actually serve people. Whether it's a pizza shop or a platform engineering team, the winners obsess over the experience on the other side of the counter. At Upbound , that means helping customers move from fragile, manual infrastructure to intelligent, API-driven control planes that developers actually love using. Thirty years from dough to cloud. Not a bad pivot. Curious what intelligent infrastructure looks like for your team? Let's talk and we are hiring across all teams. 👇 #Upbound #Crossplane #IntelligentInfrastructure #CustomerExperience #PlatformEngineering #CloudNative