Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Mirantis, Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Mirantis, Inc. seeks an exceptional engineering leader to drive k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes projects. You will lead a distributed team, shape priorities, and foster a culture of technical excellence and ownership.

You will participate in architecture reviews, contribute to upstream CNCF initiatives, and collaborate with product, field engineering, and community maintainers to advance Mirantis’ open source ecosystems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes architecture and control plane.
• Experience designing, building, debugging, or operating Kubernetes infra beyond managed services.
• Strong Go experience and production-grade code reviews.
• Experience with GitHub-based open source workflows and community discussions.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, mentoring, and driving complex work to completion.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.

Responsibilities

• Lead a distributed team of engineers working on k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes technologies.
• Set engineering priorities, ownership, and expectations while granting autonomy to experienced engineers.
• Conduct regular 1:1s, provide feedback, and support career development and onboarding.
• Build an engineering culture focused on technical excellence, transparency, collaboration, and ownership.
• Develop leaders and maintainers to distribute project knowledge across team and community.
• Provide technical direction for k0s and related projects with upstream collaboration.
• Participate in architecture discussions, code reviews, issue triage, debugging, and technical decision making.
• Maintain deep Kubernetes expertise and ensure roadmap aligns with deprecations and requirements.
• Drive quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, security, observability, and reliability.
• Balance architectural improvements with features and ecosystem evolution.
• Act as a senior maintainer in k0s/k0smotron open source communities and drive CNCF maturity.

Skills

Kubernetes

Go

Open source leadership

Distributed teamwork

English communication

GitHub workflows

Technical leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

Cluster API

Job description

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. This includes governance, security, adoption, documentation, maintainer diversity, community health, and CNCF review requirements.
• 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.

Product & Ecosystem Collaboration

• 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.

Required

• 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.

Strongly Preferred

• 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 …