Senior Principal Engineer

Overview

• 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.
• Architect Across Pillars : 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.
• Set Engineering Standards : 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.
• 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.
• Represent Mirantis Externally : 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. This is the single largest source of leverage — and the largest source of risk — at this stage of k0rdent's growth.
• Revenue Enablement : Unblock and accelerate revenue-driving capabilities by personally owning the cross-cutting technical risks that

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/

As a Senior Principal Engineer for k0rdent, you will set the technical direction across the entire k0rdent engineering department — spanning core k0rdent, AI Infrastructure, and AI Applications. You are the most senior individual contributor in the organization and the technical counterpart to the engineering leadership team. You will own end-to-end architectural coherence across these three areas, ensuring that the platform they collectively produce is greater than the sum of its parts: a unified, production-grade system 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 the hardest problems, and resolve the architectural decisions. 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.

Technical Leadership Scope:

Provide cross-departmental technical leadership without direct supervisory authority. 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.

Main Responsibilities:

Business Impact: