[Hiring] Open Source Engineering Lead @Mirantis

Role Description

Mirantis is looking for an Open Source Engineering Lead to inspire and manage the engineering team responsible for k0s and k0smotron.

k0s is a CNCF Kubernetes distribution designed to make Kubernetes simple to deploy and operate across cloud, bare metal, edge, and other environments.

The successful candidate will combine three roles:

• Engineering leader for the k0s team
• Senior technical maintainer of the project
• Visible technical representative of k0s within the Kubernetes and CNCF communities

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure people-management position.

Responsibilities

• Engineering & Team Leadership
  • Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed team of engineers working on k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes technologies.
  • Establish clear engineering priorities, ownership, and expectations while giving experienced engineers the autonomy to solve difficult problems.
  • Conduct regular 1:1s, provide actionable feedback, support career development, and participate in hiring and onboarding.
  • Build an engineering culture based on technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration, and ownership.
  • Develop additional technical leaders and maintainers so that critical project knowledge and ownership are distributed across the team and community.
• Kubernetes Technical & Release Leadership
  • Provide technical direction for k0s and related projects while working collaboratively with maintainers and the broader community.
  • Participate directly in architecture and design discussions, code and pull-request reviews, issue triage, debugging, and technical decision making.
  • Maintain deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture, control-plane components, lifecycle management, networking, storage, security, scheduling, and distributed systems.
  • Track upstream Kubernetes development and ensure relevant capabilities, architectural changes, deprecations, and requirements are incorporated into the k0s roadmap.
  • Drive engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance, and operational reliability.
  • Balance architectural improvement and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem evolution, and Mirantis product requirements.
• Open Source, CNCF & Community Leadership
  • Act as a senior maintainer and visible technical leader within the k0s and k0smotron open source communities.
  • Partner with the Community Manager and project maintainers to drive k0s through CNCF maturity from Sandbox through Incubation toward Graduation.
  • Grow meaningful participation outside Mirantis by developing contributors into sustained participants and maintainers, cultivating adopters, and strengthening vendor-neutral project governance.
  • Serve as a visible technical representative for k0s and k0smotron across the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems.
  • Develop productive relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters, and other ecosystem participants.
• Product & Ecosystem Collaboration
  • Work closely with Mirantis product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and other engineering teams.
  • Translate production experience and customer requirements into well-designed upstream capabilities without compromising sound open source architecture.
  • Help determine when capabilities belong in k0s, should be contributed to another upstream project, or should be composed from existing ecosystem technologies.
  • Maintain clear architectural relationships among k0s, k0smotron, Cluster API, k0rdent, and the broader Kubernetes ecosystem.
  • Serve as a Kubernetes and open source subject-matter expert within Mirantis.

Qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience (10+ years desired), including experience leading senior engineers and open source development teams.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture, control plane, and the underlying Linux, container, networking, storage, and distributed-systems technologies.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, debugging, or operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond simply consuming managed Kubernetes services.
• Strong experience with Go and the ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code.
• Experience working effectively through GitHub-based open source development 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 work to completion.
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.
• Ability to operate effectively in a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization.

Requirements

• Existing maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor experience in Kubernetes, CNCF, or another substantial open source infrastructure project.
• Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) and Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, or other Kubernetes-native control-plane software.
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification.
• Deep familiarity with Kubernetes internals such as etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI, and CSI.
• Experience with k0s, k0smotron, or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle technologies.
• Experience managing Kubernetes across bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or heterogeneous infrastructure.
• Familiarity with emerging Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements including accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference, and AI workload portability.
• Experience with CNCF project governance, maturity reviews, maintainership, or community processes.
• Experience speaking at technical conferences, running workshops, producing technical content, or otherwise representing an open source project publicly.
• Experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure.

Benefits

• Lead development of a real Kubernetes distribution rather than simply building applications on Kubernetes.
• Work directly with Kubernetes internals and important projects across the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Influence the technical direction of k0s, k0smotron, and the surrounding ecosystems.
• Contribute upstream and participate directly in CNCF and Kubernetes communities.
• Represent the project at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums.
• Solve infrastructure problems spanning cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure, and large-scale Kubernetes environments.