Open Source Engineering Lead

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

📋 Description

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

• Set engineering priorities, assign ownership, and establish expectations while empowering skilled engineers to tackle complex challenges.

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

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

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

• Provide technical guidance for k0s and related initiatives.

• Engage in architectural and design discussions, review code and pull requests, triage issues, debug, and contribute to technical decision-making.

• Monitor upstream Kubernetes development and integrate pertinent changes into the k0s roadmap.

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

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

• Propel k0s through CNCF maturity, progressing from Sandbox through Incubation to Graduation.

• Expand the pool of external contributors, adopters, and maintainers while reinforcing vendor-neutral governance.

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

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

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

• Translate production insights and customer needs into upstream functionalities.

• Assess whether capabilities should reside in k0s, another upstream project, or existing ecosystem technologies.

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

• Act 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 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 merely utilizing managed Kubernetes services.

• Strong proficiency in Go and the capability 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 executing complex engineering tasks.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

• Ability to work efficiently in a globally distributed and asynchronous engineering organization.

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

• Preferred 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.

• Strong familiarity with etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI, and CSI is highly desirable.

• Preferred experience with k0s, k0smotron, or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle technologies.

• Experience managing Kubernetes across various infrastructures, including bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or heterogeneous environments is strongly preferred.

• Familiarity with emerging Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements is a plus.

• Preferred experience with CNCF project governance, maturity reviews, maintainership, or community processes.

• Experience speaking at technical conferences, conducting workshops, creating technical content, or publicly representing an open-source project is highly desirable.

• Preferred experience in release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes.

🏝️ Benefits

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

• Engage directly with Kubernetes internals and projects within the cloud-native ecosystem.

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

• Contribute upstream and actively participate in 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.