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, and open source is central to how it builds technology.

The team is hiring an Open Source Engineering Lead to manage and inspire the engineers behind k0s and k0smotron.

k0s is a CNCF Kubernetes distribution made to be simple to deploy and run on cloud, bare metal, edge and other environments. It bundles the parts needed to run Kubernetes into a portable, self-contained package with few dependencies.

This role combines three jobs: leading the k0s engineering team, serving as a senior technical maintainer, 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 hands-on 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 move k0s through the CNCF maturity stages.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a purely managerial one.

The company, Inc. may use automated decision-making technology for certain employment decisions. You may ask to opt out of such use for evaluation and review tied to this position, and you may appeal any ADMT decision by writing to the address provided in the posting.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and grow a distributed team of engineers working on k0s, k0smotron 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 feedback you can act on, support career growth, and take part in hiring and onboarding.
• Build a culture around technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration and ownership.
• Develop other technical leaders and maintainers so that key project knowledge is shared across the team and community.
• Give technical direction to k0s and related projects, working alongside 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 expertise in Kubernetes architecture, control-plane components, lifecycle management, networking, storage, security, scheduling and distributed systems.
• Follow upstream Kubernetes development and make sure relevant capabilities, architectural 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 work and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem change and the company product needs.
• Work as a senior maintainer and 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 sustained participants and maintainers, building adopters, and strengthening vendor-neutral governance.
• Represent k0s and k0smotron technically across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Kubernetes Community Days, SIGs, TAGs, maintainer forums, conferences, workshops, podcasts and webinars.
• Build working relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters and other ecosystem participants.
• Work with the company product, architecture, field engineering, support, community and other engineering teams, including those for k0rdent, MOSK and MKE.
• Turn production experience and customer needs into good upstream capabilities without weakening sound open source design.
• Decide whether a capability belongs in k0s, in 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.
• Act as the Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert within the company.
• Solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure and large Kubernetes environments.
• Contribute upstream and take part directly in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.
• Represent the project at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums.

Requirements

• Significant professional software engineering experience, ideally 10+ years, including leading senior engineers and open source development teams.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture and control plane, plus the Linux, container, networking, storage and distributed systems beneath it.
• Proven experience designing, building, debugging or running Kubernetes infrastructure, not just consuming managed services.
• Strong Go skills, with the ability to review and contribute to production-quality code.
• Working experience with GitHub open source workflows: issues, pull requests, reviews, CI, releases and community discussions.
• Proven technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring and technical decisions, and in carrying complex engineering work through to completion.
• Strong written and spoken English.
• Able to work well in a global, asynchronous engineering organization.
• Strongly preferred: existing maintainer, reviewer or significant contributor experience in 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 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 publicly.
• Strongly preferred: experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management or software supply-chain work for open source infrastructure.

Conditions

This is a hands-on technical leadership role with a distributed team, not a pure people-management position.

Equal opportunity applies to all applicants.