Senior Principal Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Kazakhstan, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Establish the technical vision for the entire k0rdent engineering department, encompassing Core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications.

• Take ownership of the architectural integrity across these three domains.

• Engage in coding, system design, prototyping challenging issues, and making architectural decisions.

• Collaborate with Directors of Engineering and Engineering Managers to convert product strategy into sustainable technical execution.

• Act as the senior technical representative of the engineering organization with customers, partners, and upstream communities.

• Provide technical leadership across departments without direct supervisory control.

• Mentor and develop Staff and Principal engineers within the department.

• Create and refine the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent.

• Spearhead the design of high-risk, cross-functional platform components and interfaces.

• Set department-wide standards for API design, testing, observability, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness.

• Collaborate with upstream Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, AI/ML, and model-serving communities.

• Convert customer challenges into technical solutions alongside product management and executive leadership.

• Engage with customers, contribute to upstream initiatives, and represent Mirantis at conferences, standards organizations, and technical publications.

• Address architectural, security, scalability, and integration risks.

⛳️ Requirements

• Expert-level understanding of Kubernetes internals, cluster lifecycle, distributed systems, AI/ML workload runtimes, model serving, GPU scheduling, autoscaling during bursty inference traffic, and contemporary observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs).

• Capability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems that span various subsystems and convey designs clearly in written form.

• Ability to foresee and prioritize significant architectural decisions two to three years ahead in alignment with business realities.

• Proven track record of steering technical direction across multiple teams and organizations without direct authority.

• Demonstrated success in developing Staff, Principal, and Tech Lead-level engineers.

• Aptitude for explaining complex technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and the wider community.

• Insight into how engineering decisions impact cost, revenue, and risk.

• Strong judgment in rapidly evolving domains, particularly in AI infrastructure.

• Effective collaboration with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or 10 years of relevant experience.

• A minimum of five years in a technical leadership position is preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Opportunities for professional development and training.

• Participation in conferences and working groups.

• Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks.

• Competitive compensation package accompanied by a robust benefits plan.

• Flexible remote work arrangement.