Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Mirantis

2d

About The Position

Mirantis is seeking an Open Source Engineering Lead to manage the engineering team for k0s and k0smotron. k0s is a CNCF Kubernetes distribution focused on simplifying Kubernetes deployment and operation across various environments. This role involves engineering leadership, senior technical maintenance of the project, and representing k0s within the Kubernetes and CNCF communities. The lead will manage a distributed team, guide technical direction, maintain high engineering standards, ensure conformance, grow the contributor community, and advance k0s through CNCF project maturity stages. This is a hands-on technical leadership position.

Requirements

• 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.

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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, including KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Kubernetes Community Days, SIGs, TAGs, maintainer forums, conferences, workshops, podcasts, webinars, and other technical venues.
• Develop productive relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters, and other ecosystem participants.
• Work closely with Mirantis product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and other engineering teams, including those for k0rdent, MOSK, and MKE.
• 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.

Benefits

• Opportunity to lead development of a Kubernetes distribution.
• Work directly with Kubernetes internals and cloud-native ecosystem projects.
• Influence the technical direction of k0s, k0smotron, and surrounding ecosystems.
• Contribute upstream and participate 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed