Open Source Engineering Lead

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

📋 Description

• Lead, mentor, and nurture a distributed engineering team focused on k0s, k0smotron, and associated Kubernetes technologies.

• Set engineering priorities, define ownership, and establish expectations while empowering experienced engineers to autonomously tackle complex issues.

• Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, provide constructive feedback, support career progression, and engage in hiring and onboarding processes.

• Foster a culture centered around technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration, and accountability.

• Cultivate technical leaders and maintainers while disseminating essential project knowledge throughout the team and community.

• Offer technical guidance for k0s and related projects in partnership with maintainers and the wider community.

• Engage in architectural and design discussions, conduct code and pull request reviews, manage issue triage, debugging, and technical decision-making.

• Monitor upstream Kubernetes development and integrate relevant capabilities, changes, deprecations, and requirements into the k0s roadmap.

• Promote engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance, and reliability.

• Balance architectural enhancements and technical debt against feature development, community requirements, ecosystem growth, and product needs.

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

• Drive the progression of k0s through CNCF maturity stages from Sandbox to Incubation and ultimately towards Graduation.

• Foster external contributors, adopters, and enduring maintainers while reinforcing vendor-neutral governance.

• Represent k0s and k0smotron across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, including conferences, SIGs, TAGs, forums, workshops, podcasts, and webinars.

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

• Collaborate with product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and engineering teams, including k0rdent, MOSK, and MKE.

• Translate production experiences and customer needs into robust upstream capabilities.

• Assess whether capabilities should be integrated into k0s, another upstream project, or existing ecosystem technologies.

• Maintain architectural connections among k0s, k0smotron, Cluster API, k0rdent, and the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.

• Serve as a subject-matter expert in Kubernetes and open-source within Mirantis.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive professional software engineering experience; 10+ years preferred.

• Proven experience in leading senior engineers and managing open-source development teams.

• Profound, hands-on understanding of Kubernetes architecture, control plane, Linux, containers, networking, storage, and distributed systems.

• Experience in designing, building, debugging, or managing Kubernetes infrastructure beyond the use of managed Kubernetes services.

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

• Familiarity 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 projects to fruition.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

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

• Previous experience as a maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor in Kubernetes, CNCF, or another major open-source infrastructure project is highly preferred.

• Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI), Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, or Kubernetes-native control-plane software is strongly preferred.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification is highly preferred.

• Deep knowledge of etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI, and CSI is strongly preferred.

• Experience with k0s, k0smotron, or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle technologies is strongly preferred.

• Experience managing Kubernetes across bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or diverse infrastructure is strongly preferred.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements, including accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference, and AI workload portability is strongly preferred.

• Experience in CNCF project governance, maturity reviews, maintainership, or community processes is strongly preferred.

• Previous experience speaking at technical conferences, conducting workshops, producing technical content, or publicly representing an open-source project is strongly preferred.

• Experience in release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open-source infrastructure is strongly preferred.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunity to spearhead the development of a genuine Kubernetes distribution.

• Direct engagement with Kubernetes internals and cloud-native ecosystem projects.

• Influence the technical trajectory of k0s, k0smotron, and related ecosystems.

• Participate in upstream contributions and engage with CNCF and Kubernetes communities.

• Representation at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums.

• Opportunity to tackle infrastructure challenges across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure, and large-scale Kubernetes environments.

• Remote work flexibility.