Principal Engineer - vSphere Kubernetes Service

Broadcom•San Diego, CA

4d•$141,300 - $226,000

About The Position

Enterprises want to run Kubernetes at scale without becoming Kubernetes experts. Many Broadcom customers run mission-critical workloads on vSphere, but adopting Kubernetes often means operating a second control plane, stitching together storage, networking, identity, and lifecycle tooling, and carrying ongoing operational and upgrade risk. This complexity slows adoption and creates reliability issues at scale. The mission is to make Kubernetes boring and effectively disappear for enterprise operators by embedding it directly into the vSphere control plane and making it behave like a first-class infrastructure primitive. The role is for a Principal Engineer on the vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) team, responsible for the Kubernetes control plane built into VMware Cloud Foundation. The job is to design and build a distributed management system that runs Kubernetes control planes reliably across thousands of enterprise environments, manages the full lifecycle of Kubernetes workload clusters, integrates deeply with storage, networking, identity, and VM infrastructure, and preserves enterprise guarantees around availability, upgrades, and operability. This is platform engineering at scale, with real production impact to thousands of enterprise customers.

Requirements

Hands-on experience building and operating Kubernetes-based systems, including a deep understanding of the control plane architecture (API server, etcd, scheduler, controller-manager, etc.) and how they maintain the desired state.
Proven track record in architecting systems that deliver enterprise-grade guarantees around performance, scalability, reliability, and security in production environments.
Experience extending the Kubernetes API by designing declarative APIs and implementing reconciliation loops.
Knowledge of Linux internals (cgroups, namespaces, etc.) and container runtimes like containerd.
Knowledge of Container Network Interfaces (CNI) and managing traffic through Ingress controllers and Service Meshes (Istio, Linkerd etc.).
Knowledge of Container Storage Interface (CSI) and managing Persistent Volumes (PVs) and PVCs.
Strong systems design fundamentals (consistency, availability, failure handling)
Comfort debugging production issues across multiple layers
Ability to work independently on complex problems and collaborate across teams
Experience working in an Agile environment using Git-based workflows
Bachelor's degree plus 12+ years of related experience or Master's degree and 10+ years of related experience

Responsibilities

Design, architect, and implement distributed systems in Go, C++, or Java
Serve as a technical lead and mentor to the team, providing day-to-day technical direction and coaching to ensure successful project delivery.
Align team goals with organizational strategy, delegating tasks, and fostering a culture of collaboration.
Own the complete Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) for assigned technical areas, including design, implementation, and quality assurance.
Work with other Tech Leads and architects to translate ambiguous, large-scale problems into clear architecture, technical designs, and execution plans.
Drive and lead team processes to improve operational efficiency.
Partner with product management and customer-facing teams to translate product feedback and issues into technical requirements and execution plans.
Foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.