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Mirantis is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to set technical direction across the k0rdent platform—a Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure system spanning core orchestration, AI infrastructure, and AI applications. This is the most senior individual contributor role in the engineering organization and serves as the technical counterpart to engineering leadership.
You will own end-to-end architectural coherence across three engineering pillars, ensuring they compose into a unified, production-grade platform for running modern and AI workloads on Kubernetes at enterprise and service provider scale. This role is deeply technical and deliberately broad: you will write code, design systems, prototype hard problems, and resolve architectural decisions.
Key Responsibilities:
- Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent, ensuring decisions across core, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps compose into a coherent platform rather than parallel tracks.
- Lead design of highest-risk, cross-cutting components: cluster and state management primitives, GPU/accelerator and AI runtime layers, application and serving experience, and observability surface.
- Establish department-wide engineering standards and quality bars—API design, testing, observability, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness—and drive adoption through example and collaboration.
- Coach Staff and Principal engineers across all pillars; partner with Engineering Managers on technical career development and senior IC hiring calibration.
- Partner with engineering leaders outside k0rdent and upstream communities (Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, model-serving runtimes) to ensure k0rdent composes cleanly with the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
- Work directly with product management and executive leadership to translate customer problems into technical options and surface 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.
Business Impact: You will ensure architectural coherence across engineering pillars (the largest source of leverage and risk at this stage), unblock revenue-driving capabilities by owning cross-cutting technical risks, establish standards that keep a multi-domain platform production-ready, identify and resolve architectural and security risks before they become customer-visible, and raise the technical ceiling of the entire k0rdent engineering organization.
Requirements:
- 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).
- 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, though not necessarily the deepest expert in all four.
- Demonstrated ability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems spanning multiple subsystems and holding up under real production conditions; ability to communicate designs clearly in writing.
- 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; willingness to weight technical choices accordingly.
- Strong judgment in fast-moving domains where technology—particularly AI infrastructure—is evolving rapidly.
- Effective partnership with product management, design, sales engineering, and customer-facing teams across a broad portfolio.
