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 so project knowledge and ownership are distributed 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, architectural changes, deprecations, and requirements into the k0s roadmap
• Drive quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance, and operational reliability
• Balance architectural improvement and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem evolution, and Mirantis product requirements
• Act as a senior maintainer and visible technical leader within the k0s and k0smotron open source communities
• Help advance k0s through CNCF maturity from Sandbox through Incubation toward Graduation
• Grow participation outside Mirantis, develop contributors into maintainers, cultivate adopters, and strengthen vendor-neutral governance
• Represent k0s and k0smotron across Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, conferences, workshops, podcasts, webinars, and other technical venues
• Develop relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, and adopters
• Collaborate with product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and engineering teams, including k0rdent, MOSK, and MKE
• Translate production experience and customer requirements into upstream capabilities while preserving sound open source architecture
• 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), including experience leading senior engineers and open source development teams
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture, control plane, and underlying Linux, container, networking, storage, and distributed-systems technologies
• 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 development workflows, including issues, pull requests, reviews, CI, releases, and community discussions
• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring, technical decision making, and complex engineering delivery
• 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)
• 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 representing an open source project publicly (strongly preferred)
• Experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure (strongly preferred)

• Full-time employment
• 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 contributions and participation in CNCF and Kubernetes communities
• Representation of the project 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
• Globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization
• Career development support and mentorship opportunities