Posted 1 week ago

Open Source Engineering Lead for k0s

Mirantis

Madrid, Madrid, Spain 🇪🇸

Remote
Full Time
Kubernetes

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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
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
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
Demonstrated technical leadership in architecture, design reviews, mentoring, technical decision making, and driving complex engineering work to completion
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 experience designing, building, debugging, or operating Kubernetes infrastructure beyond simply consuming managed Kubernetes services
Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kubernetes, its architecture, control plane, and the underlying Linux, container, networking, storage, and distributed-systems technologies
Strong written and verbal English communication skills
Significant professional software engineering experience (10+ years desired), including experience leading senior engineers and open source development teams
Ability to operate effectively in a globally distributed, asynchronous engineering organization
Experience with Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) and Kubernetes controllers, operators, CRDs, or other Kubernetes-native control-plane software
Existing maintainer, reviewer, or significant contributor experience in Kubernetes, CNCF, or another substantial open source infrastructure project
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 with release management, vulnerability response, dependency management, or software supply-chain processes for open source infrastructure
Experience speaking at technical conferences, running workshops, producing technical content, or otherwise representing an open source project publicly