Senior Software Engineer — Kubernetes Control Plane (Go / Golang)

Buoyant; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Buoyant is seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to design and build production-grade Kubernetes controllers and CRDs. You will work on reconciliation loops, API integrations, and distributed systems within a Kubernetes-native product environment.

Strong Go/Golang expertise (or Rust in a Kubernetes-native context) is required, with ownership of features from design through deployment. This role is fully remote across the United States, Canada, and South America, with overlap with

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct, hands-on experience developing production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation loops.
• Strong Go/Golang development experience, or equivalent Kubernetes-native product engineering experience in Rust.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes API machinery, watches/informers, desired-state reconciliation, and resource lifecycle management.
• Experience building, debugging, and maintaining distributed systems in production.
• Ownership of substantial software components from design through deployment.
• Rust experience is desirable but NOT required; strong Go developers with Kubernetes controller/operator background encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement production Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.
• Develop Kubernetes API integrations using Go and/or Rust.
• Build software for resource lifecycle management, watches/informers, and distributed infrastructure.
• Solve challenging problems involving networking, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Own engineering features from design through production.

Skills

Go/Golang development

Kubernetes controllers

Rust experience

Distributed systems

CRDs and reconciliation loops

Tools

Kubebuilder

controller-runtime

client-go

kube-rs

Job description

Senior Software Engineer — Kubernetes Control Plane (Go / Golang)

REMOTE: United States, Canada, or South America ONLY

Experience: 7+ years

IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ BEFORE APPLYING

Buoyant is seeking experienced software engineers who have personally designed and developed production Kubernetes controllers/operators, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and reconciliation loops.

This is a hands-on Kubernetes-native software PRODUCT engineering role — NOT a DevOps, SRE, platform operations, or Kubernetes administration position.

ABOUT BUOYANT

Buoyant is the company behind Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated Kubernetes service mesh. We're expanding our engineering team to develop new cloud-native infrastructure products, including Kinference, our Kubernetes-native AI inference control plane.

You’ll join a small, experienced engineering team building distributed systems and Kubernetes-native infrastructure software, with significant technical ownership.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design and implement production Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, and reconciliation systems.
• Develop Kubernetes API integrations using Go and/or Rust.
• Build software for resource lifecycle management, watches/informers, and distributed infrastructure.
• Solve challenging problems involving networking, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Own engineering features from design through production.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS — MUST HAVE

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Direct, hands-on experience personally developing production Kubernetes controllers/operators, CRDs, and reconciliation loops.
• Strong professional Go/Golang development experience, or equivalent Kubernetes-native product engineering experience in Rust.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes API machinery, watches/informers, desired-state reconciliation, and resource lifecycle management.
• Experience building, debugging, and maintaining distributed systems in production.
• Ownership of substantial software components from design through deployment.

Professional Rust experience is desirable but NOT required. Strong Go developers with deep Kubernetes controller/operator engineering experience are encouraged to apply.

HIGHLY DESIRABLE

• Kubebuilder, controller-runtime, client-go, or kube-rs.
• Versioned CRDs, admission webhooks, Gateway API, and multi-cluster Kubernetes.
• Customer-facing Kubernetes-native software products.
• Service meshes, cloud networking, gateways, service discovery, and distributed configuration.
• gRPC, TLS/mTLS, RBAC, authentication, and performance engineering.
• Open-source infrastructure contributions.

WHAT DOES NOT QUALIFY ON ITS OWN

• Managing Kubernetes clusters using EKS, GKE, or AKS.
• Kubernetes application deployment, administration, or cluster operations.
• Helm, Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, or infrastructure monitoring.
• Installing, configuring, or using existing Kubernetes operators without developing them.
• General Go backend/API development without direct Kubernetes controller/operator implementation.

We are hiring engineers who BUILD software that extends Kubernetes — not engineers who simply USE Kubernetes.

LOCATION & EMPLOYMENT

Fully remote — United States, Canada, or South America ONLY.

At least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours is required.

Applicants must be eligible for an approved employment or contractor arrangement in their country of residence.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Buoyant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against applicants because of race, religion, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance