Open Source Engineering Lead

• Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed engineering team working on k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes technologies
• Establish engineering priorities, ownership, and expectations while enabling experienced engineers to solve complex problems autonomously
• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide feedback, support career development, and participate in hiring and onboarding
• Build a culture of technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration, and ownership
• Develop technical leaders and maintainers and distribute critical project knowledge across the team and community
• Provide technical direction for k0s and related projects in collaboration with maintainers and the broader community
• Participate in architecture and design discussions, code and pull-request reviews, issue triage, debugging, and technical decision-making
• Track upstream Kubernetes development and incorporate relevant capabilities, changes, deprecations, and requirements into the k0s roadmap
• Drive engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance, and reliability
• Balance architectural improvement and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem evolution, and product requirements
• Act as senior maintainer and visible technical leader in the k0s and k0smotron open source communities
• Help drive k0s through CNCF maturity from Sandbox through Incubation toward Graduation
• Grow external contributors, adopters, and sustained maintainers while strengthening vendor-neutral governance
• Represent k0s and k0smotron across Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, conferences, SIGs, TAGs, forums, workshops, podcasts, and webinars
• Develop relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters, and ecosystem participants
• Collaborate with product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and engineering teams including k0rdent, MOSK, and MKE
• Translate production experience and customer requirements into sound upstream capabilities
• Determine whether capabilities belong in k0s, another upstream project, or existing ecosystem technologies
• Maintain architectural relationships among k0s, k0smotron, Cluster API, k0rdent, and the broader Kubernetes ecosystem
• Serve as a Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert within Mirantis

• Significant professional software engineering experience; 10+ years desired
• Experience leading senior engineers and open source development teams
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes architecture, control plane, Linux, containers, networking, storage, and distributed systems
• Experience designing, building, debugging, or operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond consuming managed Kubernetes services
• Strong experience with Go and ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code
• Experience with GitHub-based open source workflows, including issues, pull requests, reviews, CI, releases, and community discussions
• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring, technical decision-making, and driving complex engineering work to completion
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills
• Ability to work effectively in a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization
• Existing maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor experience in Kubernetes, CNCF, or another substantial open source infrastructure project strongly preferred
• Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI), Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, or Kubernetes-native control-plane software strongly preferred
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification strongly preferred
• Deep familiarity with etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI, and CSI strongly preferred
• Experience with k0s, k0smotron, or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle technologies strongly preferred
• Experience managing Kubernetes across bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or heterogeneous infrastructure strongly preferred
• Familiarity with Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements, 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 publicly representing an open source project strongly preferred
• Experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure strongly preferred
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills

• Opportunity to lead development of a real Kubernetes distribution
• Direct work with Kubernetes internals and cloud-native ecosystem projects
• Influence over the technical direction of k0s, k0smotron, and surrounding ecosystems
• Upstream contribution and participation in CNCF and Kubernetes communities
• Representation at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums
• Opportunity to solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure, and large-scale Kubernetes environments
• Remote work opportunity