Principal Engineer

SmartRecruiters, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 210,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Open-source innovation

Professional development

Conferences and publications

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Mirantis, an IREN company, seeks a Senior Principal Engineer for k0rdent to set technical direction across core, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps, ensuring a coherent platform at scale.

You will write code, prototype hard problems, mentor engineers, and represent Mirantis with customers and upstream communities, aligning product strategy with architectural decisions.

This role demands broad systems expertise, strong communication, and the ability to drive standards and collaboration across teams.

Qualifications

• Deep Technical Breadth across Kubernetes internals, distributed systems, AI/ML runtimes, and modern observability.
• Systems Architecture for large-scale, multi-tenant platforms spanning multiple subsystems.
• Technical Strategy with multi-year planning and scope.
• Influence Without Authority: drive direction across teams through clarity and credibility.
• Mentorship: grow Staff and Principal engineers and raise the bar.
• Communication: explain complex Trade-offs clearly to engineers, executives, customers.
• Business Judgment: translate engineering decisions into cost, revenue, and risk.
• Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: act in fast-moving AI infrastructure domains.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: partner with product, design, sales engineering.
• Education and Experience: 5+ years in technical leadership preferred.

Responsibilities

• Own Cross-Departmental Technical Strategy: define and evolve the multi-quarter roadmap for k0rdent as a whole.
• Architect Across Pillars: lead high-risk design across Core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, AI Apps.
• Set Engineering Standards: establish API design, testing strategy, observability, performance, security.
• Mentor and Grow Engineers: coach Staff and Principal engineers across pillars.
• Drive Alignment with the Broader Ecosystem: collaborate with Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry communities.
• Inform Product and Business Strategy: translate customer problems into technical options.
• Represent Mirantis Externally: engage with customers and upstream communities.
• Business Impact: ensure platform coherence and enable revenue through architectural decisions.
• Quality and Reliability: maintain production-ready standards across the platform.
• Risk Mitigation: identify and resolve risks before incidents.
• Talent Density: raise technical ceiling through mentoring and hiring.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience

Job description

Mirantis, an IREN company, is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy. https://www.mirantis.com/

Job Description

As a Senior Principal Engineer for k0rdent, you will set the technical direction across the entire k0rdent engineering department — spanning core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications. You are the most senior individual contributor in the organization and the technical counterpart to the engineering leadership team. You will own end-to-end architectural coherence across these three areas, ensuring that the platform they collectively produce is greater than the sum of its parts: a unified, production-grade system for running modern and AI workloads on Kubernetes at enterprise and service provider scale.

This role is deeply technical and deliberately broad. You will write code, design systems, prototype the hardest problems, and resolve the architectural decisions. You will partner with the Director(s) of Engineering and Engineering Managers and across the department to translate product strategy into durable technical execution, and you will be the engineering organization's senior technical voice with customers, partners, and upstream communities.

Technical Leadership Scope:

Provide cross-departmental technical leadership without direct supervisory authority. Mentor and grow Staff and Principal engineers across all three pillars (Core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, AI Apps), raise the technical bar through architecture and code review, and serve as the department's senior technical representative in cross-functional, customer, and external forums.

Main Responsibilities:

Own Cross-Departmental Technical Strategy: Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent as a whole. Ensure that decisions made in core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps compose into a coherent platform rather than four parallel tracks. Identify the architectural bets that will let k0rdent scale across customers, clouds, hardware generations, and workload types, and drive consensus on which to make.

Architect Across Pillars: Lead the design of the highest-risk, cross-cutting components and contracts in the platform — the cluster and state management primitives in KCM/KSM, the GPU/accelerator and AI runtime layer in AI Infrastructure, the application and serving experience in AI Apps, and the telemetry, signal, and SLO surface in Observability. Own the interfaces and abstractions that connect them.

Set Engineering Standards: Establish department-wide patterns and quality bars — API design, testing strategy, observability requirements, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness. Drive their adoption through example, review, and direct collaboration with Engineering Managers and tech leads.

Mentor and Grow Engineers: Coach Staff and Principal engineers across all four pillars and partner with Engineering Managers on technical career development throughout the department. Help calibrate and raise the bar for senior IC hiring.

Drive Alignment with the Broader Ecosystem: Partner with engineering leaders outside k0rdent and with upstream communities (Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, CNCF AI/ML projects, model-serving runtimes) to ensure k0rdent's decisions compose cleanly with the broader cloud-native landscape that customers run alongside it.

Inform Product and Business Strategy: Work directly with product management and executive leadership to translate customer problems into technical options, and surface the technical realities — risks, costs, time horizons — that should shape product decisions across the department.

Represent Mirantis Externally: Engage with customers on the deepest technical questions, contribute to upstream projects, and represent Mirantis in conferences, standards bodies, and technical publications.

Business Impact:

Architectural Coherence: Ensure that work done across engineering pillars adds up to one platform. This is the single largest source of leverage — and the largest source of risk — at this stage of k0rdent's growth.

Revenue Enablement: Unblock and accelerate revenue-driving capabilities by personally owning the cross-cutting technical risks that would otherwise stall product delivery or force costly rewrites.

Quality and Reliability: Establish the engineering standards and review practices that keep a platform spanning core orchestration, AI workloads, and observability production-ready.

Risk Mitigation: Identify and resolve architectural, security, scalability, and integration risks before they become customer-visible incidents or block strategic deals.

Talent Density: Raise the technical ceiling of the entire k0rdent engineering organization by mentoring senior ICs and shaping Staff- and Principal-level hiring.

Qualifications

Required Skills/Abilities:

Deep Technical Breadth: Expert-level proficiency across the surface area k0rdent covers — Kubernetes internals and cluster lifecycle, distributed systems, AI/ML workload runtimes (model serving, GPU scheduling, autoscaling under bursty inference traffic), and modern observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs). You don't need to be the deepest expert in all four, but you must be credible and effective in each.

Systems Architecture: Demonstrated ability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems that span multiple subsystems and hold up under real production conditions, and to communicate those designs clearly in writing.

Technical Strategy: Ability to look two to three years ahead, identify the architectural decisions that matter most across a broad surface area, and sequence them against business reality.

Influence Without Authority: Track record of driving technical direction across multiple teams and organizations through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than reporting lines.

Mentorship: Demonstrated success developing senior engineers — Staff, Principal, and Tech Lead level — and raising the technical bar of an organization.

Communication: Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and the broader community, in both writing and conversation.

Business Judgment: Solid understanding of how engineering decisions translate into cost, revenue, and risk, and willingness to weight technical choices accordingly.

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: Strong judgment in fast-moving domains where the technology — particularly AI infrastructure — is evolving as quickly as the product.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Effective partnership with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams across a broad portfolio.

Education and Experience:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field or 10 years related experience.

At least five years in a technical leadership role preferred.

Additional Information

What does Mirantis offer you?

• Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry;
• Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies;
• Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation;
• Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued;
• Professional development and training;
• Attend conferences and working groups;
• Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks;
• Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan.

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