Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Mirantis is a Kubernetes-native infrastructure company building software that enables organizations to operate scalable, secure, and portable infrastructure across datacenters, public clouds, edge environments, and AI infrastructure. Open source is fundamental to how we build technology. Our engineers contribute to and maintain projects across the Kubernetes cloud-native ecosystem. Mirantis is looking for an Open Source Engineering Lead to inspire and manage the engineering team responsible for k0s and k0smotron. k0s is a CNCF Kubernetes distribution designed to make Kubernetes simple to deploy and operate across cloud, bare metal, edge, and other environments. It packages the components required to run Kubernetes into a highly portable, self-contained distribution with minimal dependencies. The successful candidate will combine three roles: engineering leader for the k0s team, senior technical maintainer of the project, and a visible technical representative of k0s within the Kubernetes and CNCF communities. You will lead a distributed team of experienced Kubernetes engineers and open source maintainers while remaining technically engaged in the projects themselves. You will establish technical direction, maintain a high engineering bar, ensure Kubernetes and Kubernetes AI conformance, grow the contributor and maintainer community, and guide k0s through successive stages of CNCF project maturity. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure people-management position. 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 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. Why Mirantis You will have the opportunity to: - Lead development of a real Kubernetes distribution rather than simply building applications on Kubernetes. - Work directly with Kubernetes internals and important projects across the cloud-native ecosystem. - Influence the technical direction of k0s, k0smotron, and the surrounding ecosystems. - Contribute upstream and participate directly 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. It is understood that Mirantis, Inc. may use automated decision-making technology (ADMT) for specific employment-related decisions. Opting out of ADMT use is requested for decisions about evaluation and review connected with the specific employment decision for the position applied for. You also have the right to appeal any decisions made by ADMT by sending your request to isamoylova@mirantis.com By submitting your resume, you consent to the processing and storage of your personal data in accordance with applicable data protection laws, for the purposes of considering your application for current and future job opportunities. We are a Leader for Container Management in G2 (#2 after AWS)!