Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Description

The company builds Kubernetes-native infrastructure software for datacenters, public clouds, edge sites and AI infrastructure, and open source is central to how it works.

The role leads the engineering team behind the company's CNCF-hosted Kubernetes distribution and its companion project, which packages what Kubernetes needs into a portable, self-contained distribution with few dependencies that runs across cloud, bare metal and edge.

You will combine three jobs: engineering leader for the team, senior technical maintainer, and public technical voice for the project in Kubernetes and CNCF circles.

This is hands-on technical leadership, not purely people management, so you will stay involved in the code.

The team is spread across locations and works asynchronously. You will guide the project through CNCF maturity stages, keep it conformant with Kubernetes and Kubernetes AI standards, and grow its contributor base.

The work sits on the distribution itself rather than on applications built on Kubernetes, so you will be close to Kubernetes internals and the wider cloud-native ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and grow a distributed team of engineers on the distribution, its companion project and related Kubernetes technologies.
• Set clear priorities, ownership and expectations, and give experienced engineers room to solve hard problems on their own.
• Hold regular 1:1s, give specific and actionable feedback, support career growth, and take part in hiring and onboarding.
• Build a culture that values technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration and ownership.
• Develop other technical leaders and maintainers so that key knowledge and ownership are spread across the team and the community.
• Set the technical direction for the distribution and related projects, working with maintainers and the wider community.
• Join architecture and design discussions, review code and pull requests, triage issues, debug problems and make 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 new capabilities, architecture changes, deprecations and requirements reach the roadmap.
• Raise engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance and operational reliability.
• Weigh architectural improvement and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem change and the company's product requirements.
• Act as a senior maintainer and a visible technical leader in the project's open source communities.
• Work with the Community Manager and maintainers to move the project through CNCF stages from Sandbox to Incubation and toward Graduation, covering governance, security, adoption, documentation, maintainer diversity, community health and CNCF review requirements.
• Bring in contributors from outside the company, help them become sustained participants and maintainers, win adopters, and strengthen vendor-neutral governance.
• Represent the project publicly at Kubernetes and CNCF events, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Kubernetes Community Days, SIGs, TAGs, maintainer forums, conferences, workshops, podcasts and webinars.
• Build productive relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters and other ecosystem participants.
• Work with the company's product, architecture, field engineering, support, community and other engineering teams, including those behind its other products.
• Turn production experience and customer needs into upstream capabilities that keep sound open source architecture.
• Decide whether a capability belongs in the distribution, in another upstream project, or should be assembled from existing ecosystem technologies.
• Keep the architectural relationships between the distribution, its companion project, Cluster API, the company's other products and the wider Kubernetes ecosystem clear.
• Act as the company's Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert.
• Solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure and large-scale Kubernetes environments.
• Contribute upstream and take part directly in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.

Requirements

• Required: significant professional software engineering experience (10+ years desired), including leading senior engineers and open source development teams.
• Required: deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture and control plane, and the Linux, container, networking, storage and distributed-systems technology beneath it.
• Required: proven experience designing, building, debugging or running Kubernetes infrastructure yourself, not only consuming managed services.
• Required: strong Go skills, enough to review and contribute to production-quality code.
• Required: experience working in 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 globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization.
• Strongly preferred: existing maintainer, reviewer or significant contributor to Kubernetes, CNCF or another major open source infrastructure project.
• Strongly preferred: experience with Cluster API and with Kubernetes 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 Kubernetes 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, including accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference and AI workload portability.
• Strongly preferred: experience with CNCF project 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 company may use automated decision-making technology for some employment decisions; you can ask to opt out for evaluation and review tied to this role, and you can appeal any ADMT decision, and by submitting a resume you consent to your data being processed for this and future openings.