Open Source Engineering Lead

Mirantis

. Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed engineering team working on k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes technologies .

Posted 10/6/2026full-timeRemote • CzechiaSeniorWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive experience in leading and mentoring engineering teams, particularly in Kubernetes and open source projects. Possesses deep technical knowledge in Kubernetes architecture, distributed systems, and software engineering best practices.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Kubernetes ArchitectureTechnical LeadershipGo ProgrammingOpen Source DevelopmentCI/CD Processes

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

KubernetesGoLinuxContainersNetworkingDistributed SystemsKubernetes Cluster APIKubernetes ControllersRelease ManagementVulnerability Response

Soft Skills

MentoringCommunicationCollaborationProblem-SolvingFeedback

Tools & Technologies

GitHubCIKubernetes-native Control-Plane SoftwareEtcdContainerdKubeletAPI MachineryCNICSIKubernetes Distributions

Industry Keywords

CNCFOpen SourceTechnical ConferencesCommunity ProcessesEcosystem Governance

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

BootstrapCloudDistributed SystemsIoTKubernetesLinuxOpen SourceGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead, mentor, and develop a distributed engineering team working on k0s, k0smotron, and related Kubernetes technologies
Establish engineering priorities, ownership, and expectations while enabling experienced engineers to solve complex problems autonomously
Conduct regular 1:1s, provide feedback, support career development, and participate in hiring and onboarding
Build a culture of technical excellence, pragmatism, transparency, collaboration, and ownership
Develop technical leaders and maintainers and distribute critical project knowledge across the team and community
Provide technical direction for k0s and related projects in collaboration with maintainers and the broader community
Participate in architecture and design discussions, code and pull-request reviews, issue triage, debugging, and technical decision-making
Track upstream Kubernetes development and incorporate relevant capabilities, changes, deprecations, and requirements into the k0s roadmap
Drive engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, upgradeability, security, observability, performance, and reliability
Balance architectural improvement and technical debt against features, community needs, ecosystem evolution, and product requirements
Act as senior maintainer and visible technical leader in the k0s and k0smotron open source communities
Help drive k0s through CNCF maturity from Sandbox through Incubation toward Graduation
Grow external contributors, adopters, and sustained maintainers while strengthening vendor-neutral governance
Represent k0s and k0smotron across Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystems, conferences, SIGs, TAGs, forums, workshops, podcasts, and webinars
Develop relationships with upstream Kubernetes developers, Cluster API maintainers, CNCF projects, vendors, adopters, and ecosystem participants
Collaborate with product, architecture, field engineering, support, community, and engineering teams including k0rdent, MOSK, and MKE
Translate production experience and customer requirements into sound upstream capabilities
Determine whether capabilities belong in k0s, another upstream project, or existing ecosystem technologies
Maintain 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

Requirements

What you’ll need

Significant professional software engineering experience; 10+ years desired
Experience leading senior engineers and open source development teams
Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes architecture, control plane, Linux, containers, networking, storage, and distributed systems
Experience designing, building, debugging, or operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond consuming managed Kubernetes services
Strong experience with Go and ability to review and contribute to production-quality Go code
Experience with GitHub-based open source 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 work effectively in a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization
Existing maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor experience in Kubernetes, CNCF, or another substantial open source infrastructure project strongly preferred
Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI), Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, or Kubernetes-native control-plane software strongly preferred
Experience with Kubernetes cluster bootstrap, upgrades, lifecycle management, high availability, and conformance testing or certification strongly preferred
Deep familiarity with etcd, containerd, kubelet, API machinery, CNI, and CSI strongly preferred
Experience with k0s, k0smotron, or similar Kubernetes distributions and cluster lifecycle technologies strongly preferred
Experience managing Kubernetes across bare metal, public cloud, edge, IoT, or heterogeneous infrastructure strongly preferred
Familiarity with Kubernetes AI infrastructure requirements, including accelerators, scheduling, networking, inference, and AI workload portability strongly preferred
Experience with CNCF project governance, maturity reviews, maintainership, or community processes strongly preferred
Experience speaking at technical conferences, running workshops, producing technical content, or publicly representing an open source project strongly preferred
Experience with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure strongly preferred
Strong written and verbal English communication skills

Benefits

Comp & perks

Opportunity to lead development of a real Kubernetes distribution
Direct work with Kubernetes internals and cloud-native ecosystem projects
Influence over the technical direction of k0s, k0smotron, and surrounding ecosystems
Upstream contribution and participation in CNCF and Kubernetes communities
Representation at major cloud-native conferences and technical forums
Opportunity to solve infrastructure problems across cloud, bare metal, edge, platform engineering, AI infrastructure, and large-scale Kubernetes environments
Remote work opportunity