Open Source Engineering Lead For K0s

About Mirantis

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.

About Mirantis

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.

About The Role

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 Job Description 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.