Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Description

The company is a Kubernetes-native infrastructure company that builds software for running scalable, secure, portable infrastructure across datacenters, public clouds, edge sites and AI infrastructure. Open source is central to its work, and its engineers contribute to and maintain projects in the Kubernetes cloud-native ecosystem.

The team is looking for an Open Source Engineering Lead to lead and manage the engineering team behind k0s and k0smotron.

k0s is a CNCF Kubernetes distribution built to make Kubernetes easy to deploy and run across cloud, bare metal, edge and other environments. It bundles everything needed to run Kubernetes into a portable, self-contained package with few dependencies.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role rather than a purely managerial one. You will combine three jobs: leading the k0s engineering team, serving as a senior technical maintainer of the project, and acting as the project's visible technical voice in the Kubernetes and CNCF communities.

You will lead a distributed group of experienced Kubernetes engineers and open source maintainers and stay technically involved in the code. You will set technical direction, keep the engineering bar high, keep k0s conformant with Kubernetes and Kubernetes AI standards, grow the contributor base, and guide k0s through the successive CNCF maturity stages.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and grow a distributed team of engineers working on k0s, k0smotron and related Kubernetes technologies.
• Set clear priorities, ownership and expectations, and give senior engineers room to solve hard problems on their own.
• Hold regular one-to-one meetings, give concrete feedback, support career growth, and take part in hiring and onboarding.
• Foster a culture built on technical excellence, pragmatism, openness, teamwork and ownership.
• Build up other technical leaders and maintainers so that key knowledge and ownership are spread across the team and the community.
• Set the technical direction for k0s and related projects, working with maintainers and the wider community.
• Take part directly in architecture and design discussions, code and pull request reviews, issue triage, debugging and technical decisions.
• Keep deep working knowledge of Kubernetes architecture, control-plane components, lifecycle management, networking, storage, security, scheduling and distributed systems.
• Follow upstream Kubernetes development and make sure relevant features, architecture changes, deprecations and requirements reach the k0s roadmap.
• Push engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance and operational reliability.
• Weigh architecture improvements and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem change and product requirements.
• Act as a senior maintainer and a visible technical leader in the k0s and k0smotron communities.
• Work with the Community Manager and maintainers to move k0s from CNCF Sandbox through Incubation to Graduation, covering governance, security, adoption, documentation, maintainer diversity, community health and CNCF review requirements.
• Grow participation beyond the company by turning contributors into regular participants and maintainers, cultivating adopters, and strengthening vendor-neutral governance.
• Represent k0s and k0smotron across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems at conferences such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and Kubernetes Community Days, in SIGs, TAGs and maintainer forums, and through workshops, podcasts, webinars and other technical events.
• Build good working relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters and other ecosystem members.
• Work closely with product, architecture, field engineering, support, community and other engineering teams, including those for k0rdent, MOSK and MKE.
• Turn production experience and customer needs into well-designed upstream features without weakening sound open source architecture.
• Decide whether a capability belongs in k0s, should go to another upstream project, or should be assembled from existing ecosystem tools.
• Keep the architectural links between k0s, k0smotron, Cluster API, k0rdent and the wider Kubernetes ecosystem clear.
• Be the Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert inside the company.
• Solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure and large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Requirements

• Required: at least 10 years of professional software engineering experience is preferred, including leading senior engineers and open source development teams.
• Required: hands-on, deep knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture and control plane, and the Linux, container, networking, storage and distributed systems beneath it.
• Required: proven experience designing, building, debugging or operating Kubernetes infrastructure, not only consuming managed services.
• Required: strong Go skills, with the ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code.
• Required: experience working through GitHub open source workflows, including issues, pull requests, reviews, CI, releases and community discussions.
• Required: demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring and technical decisions, and seeing complex engineering work through to completion.
• Required: strong written and spoken English.
• Required: ability to work well in a global, asynchronous engineering organization.
• Strongly preferred: current or past maintainer, reviewer or significant contributor to Kubernetes, CNCF or another large open source infrastructure project.
• Strongly preferred: experience with Kubernetes Cluster API and with controllers, operators, CRDs or other Kubernetes-native control-plane software.
• Strongly preferred: experience with cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification.
• Strongly preferred: deep familiarity with Kubernetes internals such as etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI and CSI.
• Strongly preferred: experience with k0s, k0smotron or similar distributions and cluster lifecycle tools.
• Strongly preferred: experience running Kubernetes on bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT or mixed infrastructure.
• Strongly preferred: familiarity with emerging Kubernetes AI infrastructure needs, such as accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference and portability of AI workloads.
• Strongly preferred: experience with CNCF governance, maturity reviews, maintainership or community processes.
• Strongly preferred: experience speaking at technical conferences, running workshops, producing technical content or otherwise representing an open source project in public.
• Strongly preferred: experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management or software supply-chain work for open source infrastructure.

Conditions

The role is based on a hands-on technical leadership model, not purely people management.

The company may use automated decision-making technology for certain employment decisions. You may ask to opt out of its use for evaluation and review tied to this position, and you may appeal any decision it makes by writing to the contact listed in the posting.

Submitting your resume means you consent to your personal data being processed and stored for considering this and future opportunities, under applicable data protection law.

Benefits

• The company is rated a Leader for Container Management on G2, second after AWS.