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Mirantis is seeking a Sr. Principal Engineer to serve as the most senior individual contributor and technical leader across the k0rdent platform engineering organization. k0rdent is a Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure platform enabling enterprises to build and operate scalable, secure infrastructure for modern AI, ML, and data-intensive workloads across any environment—on-premises, cloud, edge, or sovereign data centers.
In this role, you will set technical direction across three interconnected engineering pillars: core k0rdent (cluster and state management), AI Infrastructure (GPU/accelerator orchestration and AI runtime), and AI Applications (model serving and application experience). You are the technical counterpart to engineering leadership and will own end-to-end architectural coherence, ensuring these pillars compose into a unified, production-grade platform rather than parallel tracks.
You will write code, design systems, prototype the hardest problems, and resolve critical architectural decisions. Key responsibilities include:
• Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent as a whole, identifying architectural bets that enable scaling across customers, clouds, hardware generations, and workload types.
• Lead design of highest-risk, cross-cutting components—cluster/state management primitives, GPU/accelerator and AI runtime layers, application and serving experience, and observability surfaces. Own the interfaces and abstractions connecting them.
• Establish department-wide engineering standards and quality bars across API design, testing, observability, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness. Drive adoption through example, review, and direct collaboration.
• Mentor and develop Staff and Principal engineers across all pillars. Partner with Engineering Managers on technical career development and calibrate senior IC hiring.
• Drive alignment with the broader cloud-native ecosystem (Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, model-serving runtimes) to ensure k0rdent's decisions compose cleanly with customer infrastructure.
• Inform product and business strategy by translating customer problems into technical options and surfacing technical realities—risks, costs, time horizons—that should shape product decisions.
• Engage with customers on deep technical questions, contribute to upstream projects, and represent Mirantis at conferences, standards bodies, and technical publications.
This role is deliberately broad and deeply technical. You will provide cross-departmental technical leadership without direct supervisory authority, serving as the engineering organization's senior technical voice internally and externally.
REQUIREMENTS:
Required Skills/Abilities:
• Deep technical breadth across Kubernetes internals and cluster lifecycle, distributed systems, AI/ML workload runtimes (model serving, GPU scheduling, autoscaling under bursty inference traffic), and modern observability (metrics, logs, traces, SLOs). Must be credible and effective in each area.
• Demonstrated ability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems spanning multiple subsystems that hold up under production conditions, with clear written communication of designs.
• Ability to look 2-3 years ahead, identify the architectural decisions that matter most across a broad surface area, and sequence them against business reality.
• Track record of driving technical direction across multiple teams and organizations through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than reporting lines.
• Demonstrated success developing senior engineers (Staff, Principal, Tech Lead level) and raising the technical bar of an organization.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and the broader community in writing and conversation.
• Solid understanding of how engineering decisions translate into cost, revenue, and risk, with willingness to weight technical choices accordingly.
• Strong judgment in fast-moving domains where technology—particularly AI infrastructure—is evolving rapidly alongside product needs.
• Effective partnership with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams across a broad portfolio.
Education and Experience:
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or 10+ years of related experience.
• At least 5 years in a technical leadership role preferred.
