Senior Principal Engineer

Description

The role is the most senior individual contributor in the k0rdent engineering department, which covers core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications. You will act as the technical counterpart to engineering leadership and make sure the three areas form one platform: a production-grade system for running modern and AI workloads on Kubernetes at enterprise and service provider scale.

The work is hands-on and wide-ranging. You will write code, design systems, prototype the hardest problems, and settle architectural decisions. You will work with the Director(s) of Engineering and Engineering Managers to turn product strategy into lasting technical work, and you will be the senior technical voice for the engineering organization with customers, partners, and upstream communities.

Scope: you will lead technical direction across the department without direct reports. You will mentor Staff and Principal engineers in all three areas, raise the bar through architecture and code review, and represent the department in cross-functional, customer, and external settings.

Responsibilities

• Set the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent as a whole, so that choices in the three areas fit together instead of drifting apart. Identify the architectural bets that let k0rdent scale across customers, clouds, hardware generations, and workload types, and build agreement on which ones to pursue.
• Lead design of the riskiest cross-cutting components and interfaces: cluster and state management in KCM/KSM, the GPU and accelerator and AI runtime layer, the application and serving experience, and the telemetry and SLO surface in Observability. Own the abstractions that connect them.
• Define department-wide standards for API design, testing, observability, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness. Enforce them through your own examples, reviews, and work with Engineering Managers and tech leads.
• Coach Staff and Principal engineers across all four pillars and work with Engineering Managers on their technical growth. Help set the bar for senior IC hiring.
• Work with engineering leaders outside k0rdent and with upstream communities such as Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, CNCF AI/ML projects, and model-serving runtimes, so that k0rdent fits well with the wider cloud-native stack customers run.
• Work with product management and executive leadership to turn customer problems into technical options, and explain the risks, costs, and timelines that should guide product decisions.
• Speak with customers on the hardest technical questions, contribute to upstream projects, and represent the company at conferences, standards bodies, and in technical publications.
• Find and resolve architectural, security, scalability, and integration risks before they reach customers or block deals. Personally own the cross-cutting technical risks that would otherwise delay revenue-driving work or force costly rewrites.

Requirements

• Expert knowledge of Kubernetes internals and cluster lifecycle, distributed systems, AI/ML workload runtimes (model serving, GPU scheduling, autoscaling under bursty inference traffic), and modern observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs). You do not need to be the deepest expert in all four, but you must be credible and effective in each.
• Proven ability to design large, multi-tenant systems across several subsystems that hold up in production, and to explain those designs clearly in writing.
• Ability to look two to three years ahead, identify the key architectural decisions across a broad area, and sequence them against business needs.
• A record of setting technical direction across several teams and organizations through credibility and collaboration, without reporting lines.
• Proven success growing senior engineers at Staff, Principal, and Tech Lead level and raising the technical bar of an organization.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to engineers, executives, customers, and the wider community, in writing and in conversation.
• Understanding of how engineering decisions affect cost, revenue, and risk, and willingness to weigh technical choices on that basis.
• Sound judgment in fast-moving areas where the technology, especially AI infrastructure, changes as fast as the product.
• Effective work with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams across a wide portfolio.
• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or 10 years of related experience.
• Preferred: at least five years in a technical leadership role.

Conditions

Equal opportunity: the company does not discriminate on the basis of protected characteristics.

Benefits

• Work with an established leader in Silicon Valley cloud infrastructure.
• Work alongside highly capable colleagues who help Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers adopt next-generation cloud technologies.
• Contribute to cutting-edge open-source work.
• Join a young, high-energy company that values openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and ongoing growth.
• Professional development and training.
• Attend conferences and working groups.
• Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks.
• Competitive compensation and a strong benefits plan.