Engineering Team Lead, Automation, Performance & Scale

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Texas.

📋 Description

• Lead, recruit, and develop the k0rdent AI automation and performance engineering team.

• Establish direction and priorities, oversee planning, mentor engineers, and ensure the fulfillment of team commitments.

• Define acceptance criteria and exit gates for k0rdent AI releases.

• Coordinate verification efforts across component teams and facilitate evidence-based go/no-go decisions for releases, upgrade paths, and hotfixes.

• Promote shift-left testing, test pyramids, contract and integration testing, definition of done, CI quality gates, and standards for test-code reviews.

• Engage in roadmap planning and estimation, evaluating testability and non-functional risks.

• Make performance, scalability, and reliability requirements explicit and measurable.

• Establish and communicate quality and performance metrics to engineering and product leadership.

• Transform field issues and customer scenarios into automated coverage in collaboration with product management, development, SRE, and support teams.

• Design, construct, and enhance API, end-to-end, upgrade, and multi-cluster test automation frameworks.

• Oversee performance and scalability testing for control-plane scalability, GPU workload scheduling and utilization, and AI inference/serving throughput and latency.

• Conduct soak, endurance, resilience, failure-injection, upgrade/rollback, backup/restore, disaster-recovery, security, and tenant-isolation testing.

• Create reproducible on-demand test environments and infrastructure as code across local, multi-cluster, multi-region, and bare-metal GPU configurations.

• Integrate automated testing suites and performance regression checks into CI/CD pipelines.

• Automate test result collection, storage, trend analysis, and triage; develop observability and dashboards.

• Diagnose complex cross-stack failures, trace issues back to service code, and collaborate with component teams on root-cause solutions.

⛳️ Requirements

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in software engineering, test automation, performance engineering, or SRE/platform engineering.

• At least 2 years of experience in a leadership role with engineers.

• Capability to remain hands-on while leading, including framework design, production-quality code writing, and work review.

• In-depth knowledge of testing methodologies and techniques.

• Strong test automation engineering skills using Python test frameworks such as pytest or equivalent.

• Experience in API and end-to-end testing, test data and environment management, and maintaining fast, reliable test suites.

• Practical experience in designing and executing performance, load, and scalability tests for distributed systems or API platforms.

• Familiarity with tools such as k6, Locust, JMeter, kube-burner, or ClusterLoader2.

• Experience with profiling, capacity analysis, and translating results into actionable engineering insights.

• Background in failure injection, chaos engineering, soak testing, and upgrade/rollback verification.

• Strong expertise in Kubernetes, including workloads, networking, storage, RBAC, CRDs and operators, Cluster API, Helm, and cluster upgrades.

• Proficient coding skills in Python and shell scripting.

• Sufficient knowledge of Go to read service code, develop tooling or tests, trace failures, and file precise bugs.

• Experience in owning or defining release acceptance and go/no-go processes for complex infrastructure products.

• Robust CI/CD experience with pipelines as code, quality gates, and versioned release workflows.

• Fluency in Git-based workflows.

• Experience in establishing environments as code on Linux/UNIX using Docker, virtualization, Terraform or Ansible, and GitOps tools like Argo CD or Flux.

• Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, and centralized logging solutions.

• Experience in contributing to roadmap planning, estimation, and prioritization efforts.

• Excellent communication skills, particularly with geographically distributed international teams.

• Strong spoken and written English proficiency.

• Nice-to-have: experience with the k0s or k0rdent ecosystem; GPU infrastructure on Kubernetes; AI/ML workload benchmarking; public cloud providers; bare-metal provisioning; multi-region topologies; stateful supporting stacks; OpenTelemetry; security and policy testing; contributions to CNCF open-source projects.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation package accompanied by a comprehensive benefits plan.

• Opportunity to work with a recognized leader in the cloud infrastructure sector.

• Collaborate with passionate, talented, and engaging colleagues.

• Assist Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers in implementing next-generation cloud technologies.

• Engage in cutting-edge, open-source innovation.

• Thrive in a high-energy environment that values openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth.