Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

About the role

Mirantis is looking for an Open Source Engineering Lead to inspire and manage the engineering team behind 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. The role combines engineering leadership, senior technical maintenance and a visible technical presence in the Kubernetes and CNCF communities, and leads a distributed team of experienced engineers while staying hands-on.

Key responsibilities

• Lead, mentor and develop a distributed team of engineers, set priorities and ownership, run regular 1:1s, support career development and help with hiring and onboarding.
• Take part in architecture and design discussions, code reviews, issue triage and debugging, and track upstream Kubernetes development.
• Drive engineering quality across testing, CI/CD, release engineering, security, observability and performance.
• Act as a senior maintainer and partner with the Community Manager to advance k0s through CNCF maturity (Sandbox, Incubation, Graduation).
• Grow the contributor and maintainer community, represent k0s at KubeCon, Kubernetes Community Days and other events, and build relationships with upstream projects and vendors.
• Work with Mirantis product, architecture, field engineering and support teams to turn production experience into upstream capabilities.

Required profile

• Significant professional software engineering experience (10+ years desired), including leading senior engineers and open source teams.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring and complex engineering work.
• Strong written and verbal English and ability to work in a globally distributed, asynchronous organization.
• Preferred: existing maintainer or contributor experience in Kubernetes, CNCF or another large open source project, and experience speaking publicly about open source.

Required skills

• Deep hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its control plane and underlying Linux, container, networking, storage and distributed systems technologies.
• Experience designing, building, debugging or operating Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Strong Go and GitHub-based open source workflows (issues, PRs, CI, releases).
• Preferred: Kubernetes Cluster API, etcd, containerd, kubelet, CNI, CSI, k0s/k0smotron, CNCF governance and release management.