Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Responsibilities

Engineering & Team Leadership

• Lead mentor and develop a distributed team of engineers working on k0s k0smotron and related Kubernetes technologies.

• Establish clear engineering priorities ownership and expectations while giving experienced engineers the autonomy to solve difficult problems.

• Conduct regular 1:1s provide actionable feedback support career development and participate in hiring and onboarding.

• Build an engineering culture based on technical excellence pragmatism transparency collaboration and ownership.

• Develop additional technical leaders and maintainers so that critical project knowledge and ownership are distributed across the team and community.

Kubernetes Technical & Release Leadership

• Provide technical direction for k0s and related projects while working collaboratively with maintainers and the broader community.

• Participate directly in architecture and design discussions code and pull-request reviews issue triage debugging and technical decision making.

• Maintain deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture control-plane components lifecycle management networking storage security scheduling and distributed systems.

• Track upstream Kubernetes development and ensure relevant capabilities architectural changes deprecations and requirements are incorporated into the k0s roadmap.

• Drive engineering 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.

Open Source CNCF & Community Leadership

• Act as a senior maintainer and visible technical leader within the k0s and k0smotron open source communities.

• Partner with the Community Manager and project maintainers to drive k0s through CNCF maturity from Sandbox through Incubation toward Graduation. This includes governance security adoption documentation maintainer diversity community health and CNCF review requirements.

• Grow meaningful participation outside Mirantis by developing contributors into sustained participants and maintainers cultivating adopters and strengthening vendor-neutral project governance.

• Serve as a visible technical representative for k0s and k0smotron across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems including KubeCon CloudNativeCon Kubernetes Community Days SIGs TAGs maintainer forums conferences workshops podcasts webinars and other technical venues.

• Develop productive relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers Cluster API maintainers CNCF projects vendors adopters and other ecosystem participants.

Product & Ecosystem Collaboration

• Work closely with Mirantis product architecture field engineering support community and other engineering teams including those for k0rdent MOSK and MKE.

• Translate production experience and customer requirements into well-designed upstream capabilities without compromising sound open source architecture.

• Help determine when capabilities belong in k0s should be contributed to another upstream project or should be composed from existing ecosystem technologies.

• Maintain clear 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.

Qualifications :

Required

• 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 the underlying Linux container networking storage and distributed-systems technologies.

• Demonstrated experience designing building debugging or operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond simply consuming managed Kubernetes services.

• Strong experience with Go and the ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code.

• Experience working effectively through 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 driving complex engineering work to completion.

• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.

• Ability to operate effectively in a globally distributed asynchronous engineering organization.

Strongly Preferred

• Existing maintainer reviewer or significant contributor experience in Kubernetes CNCF or another substantial open source infrastructure project.

• Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) and Kubernetes 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 technologies.

• Experience managing Kubernetes across bare metal public cloud edge IoT or heterogeneous infrastructure.

• Familiarity with emerging Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements including accelerators scheduling networking inference and AI workload portability.

• 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.

Additional Information :

Why Mirantis

You will have the opportunity to:

• Lead development of a real Kubernetes distribution rather than simply building applications on Kubernetes.

• Work directly with Kubernetes internals and important projects across the cloud-native ecosystem.

• Influence the technical direction of k0s k0smotron and the surrounding ecosystems.

• Contribute upstream and participate directly in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.

• Represent the project at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums.

• Solve infrastructure problems spanning cloud bare metal edge platform engineering AI infrastructure and large-scale Kubernetes environments.

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We are a Leader for Container Management in G2 (#2 after AWS)!

We are a Leader for Container Management in G2 (#2 after AWS)!

Remote Work :

Yes

Employment Type :

Full-time