Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Description

The company is a Kubernetes-native infrastructure firm that builds software for running scalable, secure, portable infrastructure across datacenters, public clouds, edge sites and AI infrastructure.

Open source is central to how the company builds technology, and its engineers contribute to and maintain projects in the Kubernetes cloud-native ecosystem.

The team is hiring an Open Source Engineering Lead to manage and inspire the engineers behind the company's CNCF Kubernetes distribution and its k0smotron project.

The distribution is built to make Kubernetes easy to deploy and run on cloud, bare metal, edge and other environments. It bundles what Kubernetes needs into a portable, self-contained package with few dependencies.

This role combines three jobs: leading the engineering team, acting as a senior maintainer of the project, and representing the project publicly in the Kubernetes and CNCF communities.

You will lead a distributed team of experienced Kubernetes engineers and maintainers while staying hands-on in the code. You will set technical direction, keep the engineering bar high, ensure Kubernetes and Kubernetes AI conformance, grow the contributor base and guide the project through CNCF maturity stages.

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

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and grow a distributed team of engineers working on the distribution, k0smotron and related Kubernetes technologies.
• Set clear engineering 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 that values technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration and ownership.
• Develop more technical leaders and maintainers so that key knowledge and ownership are spread across the team and the community.
• Give technical direction to the distribution 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 expertise in 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 project roadmap.
• Drive 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.
• Grow participation beyond the company by turning contributors into steady participants and maintainers, finding adopters, and strengthening vendor-neutral governance.
• Represent the project publicly across Kubernetes and CNCF, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Kubernetes Community Days, SIGs, TAGs, maintainer forums, conferences, 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 with the company's product, architecture, field engineering, support, community and other engineering teams, including the teams behind its other container and cluster platforms.
• Turn production experience and customer needs into well-designed upstream features without weakening sound open source architecture.
• Decide whether a capability belongs in the distribution, in another upstream project, or should be built from existing ecosystem tools.
• Keep the architecture among the distribution, k0smotron, Cluster API, the company's other platforms and the wider Kubernetes ecosystem clear.
• Serve as the company's Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert.
• Lead the development of a real Kubernetes distribution rather than applications that merely run on Kubernetes.
• Work directly with Kubernetes internals and important projects across the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Shape the technical direction of the distribution, k0smotron and the surrounding ecosystem.
• Contribute upstream and take part directly in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.
• Speak for the project at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums.
• Solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure and large-scale Kubernetes environments.

Requirements

• Required
• 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, and the Linux, container, networking, storage and distributed-systems technologies beneath it.
• Proven experience designing, building, debugging or running Kubernetes infrastructure yourself, not only consuming managed services.
• Strong Go skills, with the ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code.
• Experience working through GitHub open source workflows, including 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.
• Ability to work effectively in a global, asynchronous engineering organization.
• Strongly preferred
• Existing maintainer, reviewer or significant contributor to Kubernetes, CNCF or another large open source infrastructure project.
• Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API and with controllers, operators, CRDs or other Kubernetes-native control-plane software.
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification.
• Deep familiarity with Kubernetes internals such as etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI and CSI.
• Experience with k0s, k0smotron or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle tools.
• Experience running Kubernetes on bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT or mixed infrastructure.
• Familiarity with emerging Kubernetes AI infrastructure needs, including accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference and portability of AI workloads.
• Experience with CNCF project governance, maturity reviews, maintainership or community processes.
• Experience speaking at technical conferences, running workshops, producing technical content or otherwise representing an open source project publicly.
• Experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure.

Conditions

This is a hands-on technical leadership role rather than a pure people-management position.

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 role, and you have the right to appeal any decision it makes.