Senior Principal Engineer

Responsibilities

• You will partner with the Director(s) of Engineering and Engineering Managers and across the department to translate product strategy into durable technical execution, and you will be the engineering organization's senior technical voice with customers, partners, and upstream communities.
• Mentor and grow Staff and Principal engineers across all three pillars (Core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, AI Apps), raise the technical bar through architecture and code review, and serve as the department's senior technical representative in cross-functional, customer, and external forums.
• Own Cross-Departmental Technical Strategy : Define and evolve the multi-quarter technical roadmap for k0rdent as a whole.
• Ensure that decisions made in core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Apps compose into a coherent platform rather than four parallel tracks.
• Identify the architectural bets that will let k0rdent scale across customers, clouds, hardware generations, and workload types, and drive consensus on which to make.
• Lead the design of the highest-risk, cross-cutting components and contracts in the platform — the cluster and state management primitives in KCM/KSM, the GPU/accelerator and AI runtime layer in AI Infrastructure, the application and serving experience in AI Apps, and the telemetry, signal, and SLO surface in Observability.
• Own the interfaces and abstractions that connect them.
• Establish department-wide patterns and quality bars — API design, testing strategy, observability requirements, performance, security, multi-tenancy, and operational readiness.
• Drive their adoption through example, review, and direct collaboration with Engineering Managers and tech leads.
• Engage with customers on the deepest technical questions, contribute to upstream projects, and represent Mirantis in conferences, standards bodies, and technical publications.
• Architectural Coherence: Ensure that work done across engineering pillars adds up to one platform.
• Unblock and accelerate revenue-driving capabilities by personally owning the cross-cutting technical risks that would otherwise stall product delivery or force costly rewrites.
• Establish the engineering standards and review practices that keep a platform spanning core orchestration, AI workloads, and observability production-ready.
• Identify and resolve architectural, security, scalability, and integration risks before they become customer-visible incidents or block strategic deals.

Requirements

• Deep Technical Breadth : Expert-level proficiency across the surface area k0rdent covers — 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).
• You don't need to be the deepest expert in all four, but you must be credible and effective in each.
• Demonstrated ability to design large-scale, multi-tenant systems that span multiple subsystems and hold up under real production conditions, and to communicate those designs clearly in writing.
• Ability to look two to three years ahead, identify the architectural decisions that matter most across a broad surface area, and sequence them against business reality.
• Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, executives, customers, and the broader community, in both writing and conversation.

Technical Leadership Scope

Provide cross-departmental technical leadership without direct supervisory authority.

Mentor and Grow Engineers

Coach Staff and Principal engineers across all four pillars and partner with Engineering Managers on technical career development throughout the department. Help calibrate and raise the bar for senior IC hiring.

Drive Alignment with the Broader Ecosystem

Partner with engineering leaders outside k0rdent and with upstream communities (Kubernetes, CNCF, OpenTelemetry, CNCF AI/ML projects, model-serving runtimes) to ensure k0rdent's decisions compose cleanly with the broader cloud-native landscape that customers run alongside it.

Inform Product and Business Strategy

Work directly with product management and executive leadership to translate customer problems into technical options, and surface the technical realities — risks, costs, time horizons — that should shape product decisions across the department.

Business Impact

This is the single largest source of leverage — and the largest source of risk — at this stage of k0rdent's growth.

Talent Density

Raise the technical ceiling of the entire k0rdent engineering organization by mentoring senior ICs and shaping Staff- and Principal-level hiring.

Influence Without Authority

Track record of driving technical direction across multiple teams and organizations through clarity, credibility, and collaboration rather than reporting lines.

Mentorship

Demonstrated success developing senior engineers — Staff, Principal, and Tech Lead level — and raising the technical bar of an organization.

Business Judgment

Solid understanding of how engineering decisions translate into cost, revenue, and risk, and willingness to weight technical choices accordingly.

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

Strong judgment in fast-moving domains where the technology — particularly AI infrastructure — is evolving as quickly as the product.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

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 related experience. At least five years in a technical leadership role preferred.

What does Mirantis offer you? Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry; Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies; Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation; Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued; Professional development and training; Attend conferences and working groups; Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks; Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan. We are a Leader for Container Management in G2 (#2 after AWS)!

Mirantis, an IREN company, is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy. https://www.mirantis.com/