Open Source Engineering Lead

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

📋 Description

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

• Set engineering priorities, define ownership, and establish expectations while empowering experienced engineers to tackle challenging problems.

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

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

• Develop technical leaders and maintainers within the team and the broader community.

• Provide technical guidance for k0s and related initiatives.

• Engage in architecture 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 and updates into the k0s roadmap.

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

• Balance architectural enhancements and technical debt with features, community requirements, ecosystem development, and product specifications.

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

• Guide the evolution of k0s through CNCF maturity stages from Sandbox to Incubation and toward Graduation.

• Foster the growth of contributors, adopters, maintainers, and establish vendor-neutral project governance.

• Represent k0s and k0smotron across Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, including conferences, workshops, podcasts, webinars, and technical venues.

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

• Collaborate with Mirantis product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and engineering teams.

• Translate production insights and customer needs into upstream capabilities.

• Assess whether capabilities are suited for k0s, another upstream project, or existing ecosystem technologies.

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

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

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive professional software engineering experience; a minimum of 10 years is 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 operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond using managed Kubernetes services.

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

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

• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring, technical decision-making, and executing complex engineering tasks.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

• Capability to function effectively in a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering environment.

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

• Strong preference for experience with Kubernetes Cluster API, controllers, operators, CRDs, or Kubernetes-native control-plane software.

• Preferred experience with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification.

• Familiarity with 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.

• Strong preference for managing Kubernetes across bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or heterogeneous infrastructure.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements is strongly preferred.

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

• Preferred experience in speaking at technical conferences, conducting workshops, producing technical content, or publicly representing an open-source project.

• Strong preference for experience in release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply chain processes.

🏝️ 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 their surrounding ecosystems.

• Contribute to upstream and engage directly with CNCF and Kubernetes communities.

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

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

• Availability for remote work.