Open Source Engineering Lead

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

📋 Description

• Lead, mentor, and cultivate 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 independently tackle complex challenges.

• Conduct regular one-on-one meetings, offer feedback, assist in career development, and engage in hiring and onboarding processes.

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

• Develop technical leaders and maintainers to ensure project knowledge and ownership are shared across the team and the community.

• Provide technical guidance for k0s and related initiatives in partnership with maintainers and the wider community.

• Participate 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, architectural modifications, deprecations, and requirements into the k0s roadmap.

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

• Balance architectural enhancements and technical debt with features, community needs, ecosystem growth, and Mirantis product requirements.

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

• Assist in advancing k0s through the CNCF maturity process from Sandbox to Incubation and ultimately toward Graduation.

• Increase engagement beyond Mirantis, develop contributors into maintainers, nurture adopters, and enhance vendor-neutral governance.

• Represent k0s and k0smotron within the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, at conferences, workshops, podcasts, webinars, and other technical platforms.

• Build 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 insights and customer needs into upstream functionalities while maintaining a robust open source architecture.

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

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive professional software engineering experience (10+ years preferred), with a background in leading senior engineers and open source development teams.

• Comprehensive, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture, control plane, and the underlying technologies including Linux, containers, networking, storage, and distributed systems.

• Experience in designing, building, debugging, or managing Kubernetes infrastructure beyond utilizing managed Kubernetes services.

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

• Familiarity with GitHub-based open source development workflows, including managing issues, pull requests, reviews, CI, releases, and community discussions.

• Proven technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring, technical decision-making, and the delivery of complex engineering projects.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

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

• Existing experience as a maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor within Kubernetes, CNCF, or another major open source infrastructure project (strongly preferred).

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

• Knowledge of Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification (strongly preferred).

• Familiarity with technologies such as 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 infrastructures (strongly preferred).

• Understanding of 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 presenting at technical conferences, leading workshops, producing technical content, or publicly representing an open source project (strongly preferred).

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

🏝️ Benefits

• Full-time employment.

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

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

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

• Opportunities for upstream contributions and participation in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.

• Representation of the project at significant cloud-native conferences and technical forums.

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

• Operate within a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization.

• Support for career development and mentorship opportunities.